Saxony-Anhalt votes with AfD polling at 41 percent and no coalition partner

Saxony-Anhalt opened polling stations from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday to elect an 83-seat Landtag. About 1.79 million people were eligible. Forty-two seats make a majority. The election is the first of three eastern state contests this month, with Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to follow in two weeks.

The last published ZDF Forschungsgruppe Wahlen poll, dated 3 September, put Alternative for Germany at 41 percent and the Christian Democratic Union at 23 percent. Die Linke was at 11.5 percent, the Social Democrats at 8.5 percent, the Greens at 6 percent, the BSW at 4 percent and the Free Democrats at 3 percent. An INSA survey on 2 September put the AfD at 43 percent and the CDU at 22 percent. In 2021 the CDU won 37.1 percent and 40 seats. The AfD won 20.8 percent and 23 seats.

No far-right party has won a German state election since 1945. That sentence is now the frame for Sunday, and it is also a trap if it is read as a forecast rather than a historical fact. The AfD can finish first and still fail to govern. Every other major party in the state has said it will not form a coalition with it. The state branch has been classed by the state office for the protection of the constitution as a confirmed right-wing extremist movement since 2023.

Ulrich Siegmund is the AfD lead candidate. He has sat in the Landtag since 2016 and has been co-chair of the party group since 2022. Delegates in Magdeburg chose him in May 2025 with 98.3 percent. He has sold a 100-day plan built on deportations and support for native-born families. Sven Schulze leads the CDU, which currently governs with the SPD and the FDP. Eva von Angern leads the Left. If the AfD falls short of 42 seats, the most likely alternative is a CDU-led coalition assembled from whoever clears the five-percent threshold.

Threshold maths will decide the night as much as the AfD raw score. The FDP is polling under 5 percent. The BSW is on the line. Every party that drops out raises the seat share of those that remain. That is how a party at 41 percent of the vote can land closer to a majority of seats than the headline number implies, or fall short if smaller parties survive. Incumbent arithmetic still favours Schulze if the firewall holds and the CDU remains the second column.

Saxony-Anhalt is not a symbolic miniature of the Federal Republic. It is a poor eastern state with out-migration, a thin industrial base and a long argument about who belongs in Magdeburg. The AfD has used that argument on TikTok and at local festivals. The CDU has used the same argument in a lower key, promising control without a break with the postwar ban on far-right government. Voters who want the break have a party. Voters who want the control without the break have Schulze. The polls say the first group is larger.

Berlin will read the result as a test of the national firewall before the next federal cycle. A first-place finish without a government is a political fact that the AfD can campaign on for two years. An absolute majority would be a different fact: the first far-right controlled statehouse in Germany since the early 1930s, with a programme Siegmund has already said should be a model for the country. Those two outcomes are not interchangeable, and Sunday can produce either, or a third in which the CDU stitches together a minority-dependent cabinet.

Counting begins when the polls close at 18:00. The first projections will show whether 41 percent was a ceiling or a floor. The second question, which will take longer, is who is prepared to sit in a room with whom in Magdeburg.