AfD takes 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and still lacks a majority

The Alternative for Germany won 43.8 percent of the party vote in Saxony-Anhalt on 6 September, more than double its 20.8 percent in 2021 and the strongest share any party has recorded in the state since reunification. The result still left the party three seats short of control. Of 83 seats in the Magdeburg Landtag, the AfD took 39. An absolute majority is 42.

The Christian Democrats, who have governed the state for years under Minister-President Sven Schulze, fell to 17.2 percent and 15 seats. That is roughly half the 37.1 percent they won five years ago. Reuters put the number of former CDU voters who moved to the AfD at about 83,000. Schulze himself lost his Magdeburg constituency to an AfD candidate.

The rest of the chamber split among five lists that all cleared the 5 percent line: the Social Democrats on 9.3 percent (8 seats), the Greens on 8.9 percent (8), Die Linke on 8.6 percent (8) and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance on 5.3 percent (5). The Free Democrats took 2.6 percent and left the parliament. Turnout was 77.8 percent, the highest for a Landtag election in Saxony-Anhalt since 1990.

The first-vote map was even starker. The AfD won 38 of 41 constituencies. Die Linke held three seats in Halle and Magdeburg. The CDU won none. Reiner Kretschmann took Eisleben with 55.6 percent. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider took Querfurt with 54.9 percent. AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund won Genthin with 49 percent.

Because every other party still applies the so-called firewall against the AfD, the only arithmetic path to 42 seats without it is a five-party arrangement: CDU, SPD, Greens, Linke and BSW. Any four of those parties fall short. CDU plus the three larger left parties reaches 39, the same number the AfD holds alone. On Monday the AfD asked individual CDU lawmakers to break ranks. Union parliamentary leader Thorsten Frei told ZDF, "We do not speak with right-wing extremists." BSW said it would not join an AfD cabinet, though it left the door open to talks on specific bills.

The state office for the protection of the constitution classifies the Saxony-Anhalt AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist. The party's platform in the campaign called for mass deportations, an end to military aid for Ukraine and an exit from the euro. France and Poland treated the result as a warning. Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski called it "a very worrying sign."

Chancellor Friedrich Merz's federal coalition is already unpopular, and Schulze blamed part of the CDU collapse on Berlin. Merz cannot appoint a state government. He can watch eastern voters treat the firewall as the main fact of German politics rather than a temporary tactic. If Magdeburg fails to form a cabinet, the state faces either a minority government that needs AfD votes bill by bill, or a fresh election that would test whether 43.8 percent was a ceiling.

Siegmund now has the largest group in the chamber and no partner. The other five parties have a majority on paper and almost no shared programme. That is the government problem the night produced. The vote share is the headline. The missing three seats are the constraint that will decide what, if anything, sits in the state chancellery.