AfD takes 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and still cannot govern

Alternative for Germany won 43.79 percent of the party-list vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, 6 September, according to the official preliminary result from the state statistical office. That is the strongest score for any party in a German state election in the past decade and the best result for any party in Saxony-Anhalt since reunification. It still leaves the AfD three seats short of a majority in the 83-member Landtag.

The seat count is 39 for the AfD, 15 for the Christian Democratic Union, 8 each for the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left, and 5 for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. The Free Democrats stayed out at 2.58 percent. The AfD more than doubled its 2021 list score of 20.8 percent. The CDU collapsed from 37.1 percent to 17.23 percent, its worst Saxony-Anhalt result since 1990. About 83,000 former CDU voters moved to the AfD.

Direct mandates tell a sharper story. The AfD won 38 of 41 constituencies. The Left took the other three, one in Magdeburg and two in Halle. The CDU won none. Minister-President Sven Schulze lost Magdeburg III to Christian Mertens of the AfD, who took 35.2 percent. Reiner Kretschmann won Eisleben with 55.6 percent, the highest first-vote score in the state. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider took Querfurt with 54.9 percent. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund won Genthin with 49 percent.

Turnout was 77.82 percent of 1,706,851 registered voters. That is the highest Landtag turnout in Germany since Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1998. Valid list votes totalled 1,315,315.

Siegmund had said before polling day that he would run for minister-president only with an absolute majority. He missed it. He still called the night historic and a signal to Berlin. National co-leader Tino Chrupalla asked CDU lawmakers on ARD to back a “centre-right conservative majority.” The CDU, SPD, Greens and Left all maintain a refusal to govern with the AfD. The state domestic intelligence agency classifies the Saxony-Anhalt AfD branch as confirmed right-wing extremist.

That arithmetic produces a stalemate. The AfD has 39 seats. A bloc of CDU, SPD, Greens and Left also has 39. BSW, with five seats, sits in the middle. The party is socially conservative and has left the door open to working with the AfD on some issues. No other path to 42 is obvious.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not speak on election night. Schulze blamed part of the defeat on Berlin, where Merz is struggling with weak growth and low personal ratings. France and Poland treated the result as a warning. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called it a very worrying sign. Two more Landtag votes follow on 20 September in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin. The firewall policy that has kept the AfD out of office now faces a legislature in which no majority exists without it or without BSW.