AfD wins 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt but falls three seats short

The Alternative for Germany won Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8 percent of the second vote, more than double its 20.8 percent in 2021, according to the preliminary official count released early on Monday in Halle. The party took 39 of 83 seats in the Magdeburg Landtag. An absolute majority needs 42.

That three-seat gap now shapes the next government. Mainstream parties still refuse to sit with the AfD, a practice they call the firewall. The outgoing Christian Democrats, who have run the state for 24 years, collapsed to 17.2 percent and 15 seats. In 2021 they held 37.1 percent.

The Social Democrats finished on 9.3 percent, the Greens on 8.9 percent and the Left on 8.6 percent, eight seats each. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, scraped in with 5.3 percent and five seats. The Free Democrats, junior partners in the outgoing cabinet, scored 2.6 percent and left the chamber.

A record share, and a record turnout

About 1.7 million people were eligible to vote. Turnout reached 77.8 percent, the highest in Saxony-Anhalt since German reunification in 1990 and well above the 60.3 percent recorded five years ago. Almost all of the 41 direct constituencies went to the AfD. The Left held one seat in Magdeburg and two in Halle.

AfD lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund won his own constituency with 49.0 percent against the CDU's Thomas Staudt. Siegmund told ZDF on election night that he would not accept a coalition built on large concessions. He dismissed a BSW suggestion of a cross-party minister-president as messy bargaining.

The result is the strongest AfD score in any German state election and the highest share for any party in a Landtag vote over the past decade. Saxony-Anhalt's domestic intelligence service lists the state branch as confirmed right-wing extremist. That classification did not stop the surge.

Why the arithmetic is tight

CDU, SPD and Greens together do not hold a majority, even if the Left tolerated them from outside. Those four parties have 39 seats, the same number as the AfD. Adding BSW's five seats would give a non-AfD bloc 44. BSW has not ruled out limited cooperation with Siegmund's party, which is why its five deputies now sit at the centre of any deal.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU has governed the state since 2002. Sunday's result is its worst Landtag score in Saxony-Anhalt. The defeat lands on a federal party already managing eastern discontent over energy prices, migration and the war in Ukraine. Merz's government has no direct vote in Magdeburg, but the state result will be read in Berlin as a test of whether the firewall still holds when a party crosses 40 percent.

Saxony-Anhalt is not a large state. Its weight is political rather than demographic. It is one of the poorer eastern Lander, with a shrinking working-age population and a long record of protest voting. The AfD first entered the Landtag here in 2016. Ten years later it is the largest party by a wide margin.

What happens next

Exploratory talks will start this week. Siegmund can wait. The other parties cannot form a cabinet without either BSW or a break in the firewall. Fresh elections remain a threat Siegmund himself raised overnight. Repeating the vote would be costly and would not, on current numbers, look kinder to the CDU.

The new Landtag must elect a minister-president. Until it does, Sven Schulze stays in office in a caretaker role. Schulze took over from Reiner Haseloff and led a CDU-SPD-FDP coalition into Sunday. Two of those three parties are now either halved or gone.

Germany's next federal election is still some way off. State votes in the east have become the early warning system. Thuringia and Saxony already showed the AfD as the strongest force in 2024. Saxony-Anhalt has now put a number on how far that shift can run when turnout is high and the centre-right incumbent is weak.

The preliminary count is complete. The legal confirmation will follow in the coming days. The seat math is unlikely to move by three places. Magdeburg therefore faces a choice that German state politics has so far avoided: work with the AfD, invent a minority cabinet that BSW props up, or go back to the voters.