Forty-Four Percent: The AfD's Historic State Win in Saxony-Anhalt, and What Comes Next

It happened tonight. For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic, a "far-right" party has won a German state election with a result that puts it within touching distance of governing alone. With near-final projections in, the Alternative for Germany took roughly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling its 2021 result, on a record turnout near 77 percent. The CDU, the party that has run this state since 2002 and holds the chancellery, was cut to under 18 percent, its worst result there ever. The AfD's projected 39 seats in the 83-seat Magdeburg Landtag leave it two or three short of an absolute majority, and only because the BSW scraped over the 5 percent threshold by a tenth of a point.

"We have written history," lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund told supporters, before thanking Chancellor Friedrich Merz as "a very good campaigner for us." Federal co-leader Alice Weidel promised "explosive growth across all of East Germany, and at the federal level too." SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil called the night "saddening" and a "turning point" for the country. Both readings are correct, and that is the story. Here is how Germany got to this result, what the numbers actually say, and why the next two weeks matter more than any German electoral window since reunification.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

From Professors' Protest to Poll Leader

Photo: Olaf Kosinsky, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The AfD was founded in February 2013 by economics professors and ex-CDU figures as an anti-euro protest party. Its founding cause was opposition to Greek bailouts, not migration. That party no longer exists in any meaningful sense. Founder Bernd Lucke was pushed out in 2015, his successor Frauke Petry walked out in 2017 the morning after the AfD entered the Bundestag with 12.6 percent, and each purge moved the party further right. The 2015-16 migration crisis gave it a permanent cause; the eastern states gave it a base; and the nationalist wing built around Thuringia's Björn Höcke, the faction once formally known as Der Flügel, gradually became the party's center of gravity rather than its fringe.

Today the party is co-led by Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, with Weidel as its chancellor face and its international ambassador. Membership has climbed past 73,000, growing even as, or arguably because, the establishment moved against it. In May 2025, after a three-year investigation, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) classified the AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor, finding that the party "aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society." That designation triggered calls across the mainstream parties for a constitutional ban procedure.

Then the courts intervened. On February 26 this year, the Cologne Administrative Court suspended the classification by temporary injunction while the AfD's lawsuit proceeds, ruling that the conditions for the confirmed-extremist label were not met on the record before it. The underlying case is still being litigated, the ban debate is still simmering, and in the meantime the AfD campaigns as the martyr of an establishment that tried to outlaw its opposition. Analysts quoted across German media keep landing on the same paradox: every institutional attack has fed the party's core narrative instead of shrinking it.

The Scoreboard: Four Elections, One Direction

Photo: Juergen Matern, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The trajectory is easiest to see as a ledger.

September 2024, Thuringia: the AfD under Höcke wins a state election outright with about a third of the vote, the first far-right state election win in postwar German history. The firewall holds; every other party refuses coalition talks; the AfD is kept from government despite finishing first, but takes a blocking minority in the state parliament.

February 2025, the federal election: the AfD doubles its result to 20.8 percent and becomes the second-largest party in the Bundestag with 152 seats, the strongest far-right federal result in postwar history. Friedrich Merz's CDU/CSU wins with 28.5 percent and forms a coalition with a diminished SPD.

March 2026, the west falls in line: in Baden-Württemberg the AfD nearly doubles to 18.8 percent, at that point its best result in any western state. Days later Rhineland-Palatinate beats it, 19.5 percent, up 11.2 points, more than double its 2021 share. The party that mainstream analysis long dismissed as an eastern protest phenomenon posted its two strongest western results in the same month. In Baden-Württemberg, exit analysis showed 37 percent of manual laborers voting AfD against 5 percent for the SPD, the party built to represent them.

September 2026, the national picture: PolitPro's weighted average now has the AfD leading federally at 27.9 percent against 20.9 for the CDU/CSU, a seven-point lead over the chancellor's party, with some individual polls near 30. Merz's coalition parties together poll around 33 percent, far short of a majority, and his personal approval has hit record lows. The February 2025 result has effectively inverted in eighteen months.

And now September 6, 2026, Saxony-Anhalt: 44 percent, the strongest state-election result by any German party in ten years, delivered not by a protest spike but by the largest turnout the state has ever recorded.

The Result: A Landslide Without a Majority

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Saxony-Anhalt is the eastern state where the AfD's lead is widest, and the incumbents made it an open race. Reiner Haseloff, the CDU minister-president who governed since 2011 and beat back the AfD in 2021 with a personal-vote surge to 37.1 percent, announced his retirement in August 2025. His successor Sven Schulze inherited the office in January and polls at 22-23 percent. The CDU vote without Haseloff has collapsed by 14 points; nearly all of it moved right.

The AfD's lead candidate is Ulrich Siegmund, 35, a Landtag member since 2016, confirmed by his party with 98.3 percent, and one of the AfD's most effective social media operators. Der Spiegel put him on its cover in August as "the most dangerous man in Germany." Siegmund's campaign bought up copies and handed them out at rallies. He attended the now-infamous 2023 Potsdam meeting where deportation plans for people with migration backgrounds were discussed, lost a committee chairmanship over it, and gained in the polls anyway. His stated program for the state includes abolishing Saxony-Anhalt's own Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the agency that surveils his party, and the state AfD program proposes stripping Ukrainian war refugees of their status, suggesting they "seek protection in western Ukraine instead."

The final math, per the late-evening ARD and ZDF projections carried by Tagesspiegel: AfD 44 percent and 39 seats. CDU 17.5 to 17.8 percent and 16 seats. SPD and Greens around 9 percent and 8 seats each, Linke just under 9 and 8 seats, BSW at 5.0 to 5.1 percent for 4 seats, FDP out of parliament entirely at 2.4. Turnout hit a record 77 to 78 percent, up from 60.3 in 2021, and the AfD won the mobilization war anyway. Pre-election polling had the party at 40 to 42; it beat its own polls. Tagesspiegel notes it is the best result any German party has posted in a state election in a decade.

The threshold math decided everything. Had the BSW landed a tenth of a point lower, its votes would have been redistributed among the parties that cleared 5 percent, and 44 percent of the vote would likely have converted into an outright seat majority. Siegmund had said it plainly during the final week, as carried by Al Jazeera: "It was the others who erected the firewalls. If no one wants to work with us, then we'll just have to do it alone." Tonight he came within one decimal of getting the chance.

If the AfD falls short of an absolute majority, the firewall scenario repeats: a CDU-led everyone-but-AfD coalition, likely spanning from the CDU to the Left party, negotiated over weeks, governing a state where four in ten voters chose the party excluded from power. German commentators have spent the campaign arguing about which outcome damages democratic legitimacy more.

How a Firewall Erodes

The Brandmauer, the wall of non-cooperation every mainstream party maintains against the AfD, is still formally intact. In practice, 2026 has been the year of its visible cracking, and the mechanics are worth understanding because they are the actual answer to how this party is coming to power.

First, policy co-option. The Merz government tightened border controls and suspended family reunification, positions the AfD campaigned on for a decade. The AfD simply claimed authorship. Voters who wanted those policies concluded the original was available instead of the copy, and the polling gap kept widening. Merz himself has begun calling for engaging the AfD on substance rather than pure isolation.

Second, the collapse of the traditional left's base. The SPD polls at 12 percent federally, down from an already historic low. Its reorientation toward urban progressive voters left industrial and rural constituencies open, and the AfD's restoration message, your country, your wages, your streets, filled the vacuum. The Baden-Württemberg labor numbers are the starkest single data point.

Third, external legitimation. Elon Musk hosted Weidel on X before the February 2025 election and told his audience "only AfD can save Germany"; engagement with AfD content on the platform multiplied roughly eightfold. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly attacked the German extremist designation as "tyranny in disguise." An American administration treating the AfD as a legitimate partner has made the German quarantine harder to sustain, diplomatically and psychologically.

Fourth, scandal immunity. Corruption stories about Siegmund's family finances, the Potsdam revelations, the extremism designation itself: none of it moved the numbers down. Polling analysis this year found around 65 percent of AfD voters citing the platform, not protest or personalities, as their motivation. That is the signature of consolidated support, not a mood.

September 20 and the Road to 2029

Whatever happens with the coalition math, the second act comes in two weeks. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern votes September 20 with the AfD leading at roughly 36 percent against SPD incumbent Manuela Schwesig's 30, though her late momentum is real and that race has tightened. Berlin votes the same day, and recent polls have put the AfD in first place in the capital for the first time ever, in the high teens against a fragmented field. Sweeping first place in an eastern stronghold, a northern SPD bastion and the capital in one month would be the strongest sub-national showing by a German far-right party in the Federal Republic's history, and every analyst quoted this week frames it the same way: as the launch platform for the 2029 federal election. Siegmund himself told supporters an absolute majority would propel the party toward "national victory in 2029."

The constraint on all of this is constitutional. A state government cannot conduct foreign policy, cannot leave NATO, cannot reopen a pipeline. What it can do is appoint police leadership and senior civil servants, reshape school curricula and cultural funding, vote in the Bundesrat, and, per Siegmund's own program, dismantle the state-level agency that monitors the party. It would also do something less tangible and more important: prove, for the first time, that voting AfD produces an AfD government. The firewall's deterrent has always been that an AfD vote was a wasted vote. Tonight came within a decimal of ending that argument.

The Russia File

Photo: Elekes Andor, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

For this channel's readers, the foreign policy stakes are not abstract. The AfD's federal program, as documented by Kyiv Post and Newsweek among others, calls for ending German weapons deliveries to Ukraine, lifting sanctions on Russia, keeping Ukraine out of NATO and the EU, restoring economic ties with Moscow and reopening the Nord Stream pipelines. The party's own formulation: "The USA remains our partner. Russia should become one."

The record matches the program. Weidel and Chrupalla boycotted Zelensky's 2024 Bundestag address, with party figures deriding him as a "war and beggar president." This summer Weidel demanded Ukraine pay Germany reparations for the Nord Stream sabotage, a framing that presumes Kyiv's guilt and mirrors Moscow's line, and Chrupalla has repeatedly characterized the pipeline attack as Ukrainian state terrorism. Germany is Ukraine's largest European arms supplier and its financial anchor in the EU. The AfD does not need the chancellery to matter here; a party polling first nationally pulls the entire German debate toward its positions, and the Merz government's Ukraine policy already operates under that gravity. A first state government would normalize the rest.

What Happens Now

The seat arithmetic leaves exactly one non-AfD majority on the table: all five other parties together. CDU, SPD, Greens, Linke and BSW hold a combined 44 of 83 seats, a two-seat cushion. That is the entire firewall. And building it requires the CDU to govern alongside the Linke and the BSW, which its own standing incompatibility resolution rules out on paper. Every alternative runs through the AfD: a CDU-AfD coalition would shatter the Brandmauer nationally, an AfD minority government would need other parties to tolerate it vote by vote, and a failed government formation eventually points back to new elections that, on tonight's numbers, the AfD would likely win bigger. Siegmund, for his part, spent his victory speech extending "a hand to all democratic forces," the reasonable-partner script the party has been running all year.

Watch three things in the coming days: whether the CDU state party holds the line under a result that halved it, whether Berlin's CDU leadership signals any softening on cooperation, and how the Magdeburg parliament handles the minister-president vote when it convenes, because a secret ballot with a 39-seat AfD bloc is exactly the scenario in which firewalls have historically sprung leaks. Then comes September 20: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD leads at roughly 36 percent, and Berlin, where it has led polls in the capital for the first time. Tonight's result will not stay contained to Saxony-Anhalt; Weidel said as much within the hour. There was no outcome tonight in which the AfD lost ground. The count only answered how fast this is moving.

The channel will be tracking the fallout, and the September 20 votes, daily on Telegram at t.me/TheLeaflet, and the deep reads land every morning here in The Daily Sitrep.

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Sources

Reporting and data: ARD and ZDF projections as carried by Tagesspiegel, NPR, ABC News, Al Jazeera, France 24, Bloomberg, Atlantic Council, The UnPopulist, Brussels Signal, Kyiv Post, Newsweek, PolitPro polling aggregates, Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung election analyses, and official state election result tables for the 2025 federal and 2026 state elections. Result figures are near-final projections as of late evening September 6 and may shift marginally in the official count. Photos via Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons licenses credited in each caption.