AfD takes 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt and still lacks three seats to govern

Alternative for Germany won 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, 6 September, its strongest result in any German state election. The party took 39 of 83 seats in the Magdeburg Landtag, three short of a majority. The Christian Democratic Union, which had led the state for 24 years, fell to 17.2% and won none of the 41 direct constituencies.

Turnout reached 77.8%, the highest for a Landtag election in eastern Germany since the 1990s. AfD candidates won 38 constituencies. Die Linke took the remaining three, one in Magdeburg and two in Halle. Reiner Kretschmann recorded 55.6% of first votes in Eisleben. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider took 54.9% in Querfurt. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund won Genthin with 49%. Christian Mertens beat Minister-President Sven Schulze in Magdeburg III with 35.2%.

The rest of the chamber is splintered. The SPD took 9.3%, the Greens 8.9% and Die Linke 8.6%, eight seats each. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance crossed the 5% threshold with 5.3% and five seats. The FDP finished at 2.6% and is out. CDU, SPD, Greens and Linke together hold 39 seats, the same block as the AfD. BSW holds the arithmetic that decides whether anyone can assemble 42 votes without the AfD.

National AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla told ARD that politics means compromise and asked CDU deputies to make a centre-right majority possible. Alice Weidel called the result historic. Chrupalla said Siegmund would be the new minister-president and added that the AfD had cut the CDU in half, turning Friedrich Merz’s old pledge back on him. Siegmund said the vote sent a signal to Berlin.

Merz’s conservatives have spent a decade refusing to govern with the AfD. That rule, the Brandmauer, is now being tested in a state the CDU ran. Thorsten Frei, leader of the CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag, called the result a turning point and said conservatives must ask why they no longer reach voters. Chancellery minister Nina Warken used the word caesura. Schulze blamed part of the collapse on Berlin, where Merz is trying to lift a stagnant national economy and remains deeply unpopular.

About 83,000 former CDU voters moved to the AfD, according to the official breakdown cited by Reuters. The CDU share almost halved from 37.1% in 2021. The AfD more than doubled its 2021 score. It finished first in every one of the state’s 218 municipalities. That geographic sweep is new. Previous eastern wins left cities and a few university towns with other majorities. This time the map is uniform.

The Saxony-Anhalt branch of the AfD is classified as confirmed right-wing extremist by the state domestic intelligence agency. The party’s published plans for the state include a harder line on migration, separate school classes for refugee children and limits on Islamic public expression. SPD, Greens, Die Linke and the CDU have all said they will not enter a coalition with it. BSW founder Sahra Wagenknecht called the firewall a failure and warned that another coalition built only to exclude the AfD would affront voters.

Two more eastern states vote in twelve days. French and Polish officials treated Sunday as a warning. Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski called the outcome a very worrying sign. The Landtag numbers themselves are colder. Thirty-nine is not forty-two. Someone has to move, abstain, or split. If no one does, Saxony-Anhalt faces a minority experiment or a second election. Either path keeps the AfD at the centre of the state’s next government, whether it holds the chair or sits across from it.

Siegmund already speaks as if the chair is his. The other parties still speak as if the firewall holds. The 77.8% who voted have given both statements a deadline. Magdeburg now has to produce a government from a chamber in which the largest party is shunned by the rest and the former governing party has no constituency trophy to show for 24 years in office.