Merz calls Saxony-Anhalt a national shock and warns the AfD about the Basic Law

Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on 7 September that he was deeply shocked by the Alternative for Germany's result in Saxony-Anhalt and that the vote will have consequences. Speaking after CDU leadership meetings in Berlin, he told reporters that 6 September had changed something in the whole country, not only in one state. The AfD took 43.8 percent and 39 of 83 Landtag seats. The CDU under Sven Schulze fell to 17.2 percent. Turnout was 77.8 percent.

Merz ruled out working with the AfD and said power in Germany is granted, not seized. He warned that if an AfD-led state government crossed constitutional lines, the federal government he leads will make sure that the Basic Law is enforced. The Basic Law also applies in Saxony-Anhalt, he said. He told anxious listeners that institutions are wehrhaft und stabil, able to defend themselves and stable.

He also refused to drop the reform programme that has made the CDU unpopular. Pension, health and care changes would continue, he said, because the country needs fundamental reforms. He was ready to discuss details with the Social Democratic coalition partner in the coming days, including parts of the pension package and the size of a tax reform. Giving up, he said, was not an option. He told foreign partners that Germany's European and foreign policy course would hold.

AfD state leader Ulrich Siegmund called the result a mandate to govern and asked other parties to talk. The party's state programme includes separate classes for child refugees and a unit to detain and deport people without a right to stay. Tino Chrupalla turned Merz's old pledge to cut the AfD in half back on the chancellor: the CDU, he said, had been cut in half instead. Some talk in Magdeburg points at the BSW as a possible partner. The CDU firewall at federal level remains official policy.

No far-right party has run a German state since 1945. Saxony-Anhalt's next government will control police and schools in that state. Those two files are why the result travels beyond Magdeburg. A state interior ministry that treats deportation as its first task changes the daily work of federal agencies that share borders and databases with it.

Merz's Monday remarks try to do two jobs at once: accept that the election is a national shock, and tell both the AfD and his own voters that Berlin will not treat 39 seats as a blank cheque. Coalition maths in Magdeburg will show which of those statements matters first. The AfD is three seats short of a majority. Someone has to sit with it, or someone has to build a minority that can survive without it. That arithmetic, not the chancellor's adjectives, will decide whether 7 September was a warning or a prelude.