As the blue bar shoots up, the AfD politicians jump into each other's arms on the stage in the Old Theater in Magdeburg. They jump, hit each other on the shoulders, raise both fists in the air, and the hall in front of them goes wild. State parliament member Tobias Rausch is the first to step up to the microphone and celebrates the first forecast: “44 percent for the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, what a result!” He sees a clear government mandate. Party leader Alice Weidel had previously confirmed this on television.
“We have our prime ministerial candidate to thank for this success,” says Rausch in the Old Theater. Ulrich Siegmund himself is not at the election party yet, he is not expected until later - he has to give a lot of interviews beforehand. He told ARD shortly after 6 p.m.: “We achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve: We made history in this country.” Even if, according to projections, an absolute majority is not enough. The AfD is missing one seat.
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"We will always reach out to all possible forces"
For weeks everything has been leading up to this moment for the party. Siegmund had attended election campaign appointments almost every day, taken selfies with fans for hours and gone on rides on his Simson moped. The election campaigners often spoke of the “next Prime Minister Siegmund”, who in turn often pointed out that this was only the first step, that he was practically just the harbinger of a “Chancellor Alice Weidel”.
On election evening, Siegmund left unanswered whether he would now become Prime Minister with his result. “We will always reach out to all possible forces,” he said. That sounds different than in previous days. He had repeatedly said that he would only govern with an absolute majority. Without this, says Siegmund, there would be the “first blood sausage coalition” from the CDU to the Left in Germany, which would not last long. And the AfD will be successful in the next election.
The election winner is now saying that she would be open to a coalition with a party that wants to implement a new course in migration and energy policy. However, Siegmund rejects a minority AfD government. There was also a broad consensus at the election party to claim the government mandate. Jean-Pascal Hohm, the chairman of the AfD's youth organization, told the F.A.Z. that "Plan A" was the absolute majority, but there were other options, such as bringing individual members of the CDU into their own parliamentary group.
Awkward, icy silence
However, the CDU as a whole has clearly ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD. As always, she accepted the election results in a hall of the Magdeburg Maritim Hotel. In the last election in the summer of 2021, the Christian Democrats celebrated a 37.1 percent result on the same psychedelic patterned carpet and saw their self-image as the “Saxony-Anhalt Party” once again confirmed. This time is over with the first forecasts displayed at 6 p.m. Not a hand moves, there is an awkward, icy silence.
The displayed values of less than 18.5 percent are not only far behind the goal of exceeding the 30 percent mark, which was considered realistic within the party just a few months ago. The little black bars on the screens are a disaster that no one in the CDU expected just a few hours ago.
Nevertheless, in the days before the election there was hectic and controversial debate within the party about what an election result of less than 25 percent could mean for the top candidate Sven Schulze. Schulze was never able to build on the traction of Reiner Haseloff, whom he succeeded in a messy move at the beginning of the year. The election campaign, which therefore lacked time for strategic planning, appeared erratic and half-baked in many places.
In the past few days, internal party opponents have been gathering, with Bundestag member Sepp Müller emerging as their leader. The main question was whether the CDU could claim to form a government after such an election result or whether it should pass the ball into the AfD's field. Implicitly it was also about personnel issues and the political future of Sven Schulze.
The next meetings are already planned
The first round of the internal party wrestling had already taken place at 6 p.m. At 2:30 p.m. there was a meeting between the executive state board led by state chairman Sven Schulze and the district chairmen of the Saxony-Anhalt CDU in the “Stuttgart area” of the Maritim Hotel to determine the wording for the election evening. Sepp Müller also took part in the meeting unscheduled. The participants unanimously reported that the desire for unity was dominant at the meeting. At this point, however, no CDU politician had any tendencies about the election outcome, and the extent of the debacle was not yet foreseeable. The next meetings are already planned: After a planned meeting by the executive state executive board on Monday morning, the leadership of the state CDU will meet in the south of Magdeburg on Monday evening before the newly elected parliamentary group meets for the first time on Tuesday.
Sven Schulze did not comment on his future during his first appearance on Sunday evening. When he steps onto the psychedelic carpet at 6:23 p.m. accompanied by his wife, he receives defiant applause. The CDU top candidate and state chairman briefly congratulates the AfD, speaks of a “defeat” and says that it is about recognizing the “sign” associated with the election result. Then there was more defiant applause and Schulze’s departure.
Things aren't as turbulent for the SPD on election night. The red bar in the projections is no longer as high as it used to be. But with top candidate Armin Willingmann, the party prevented a further decline and stabilized at around nine percent, at least that was the impression on the early election evening. The 63-year-old Science Minister refrained from loudspeaking during the election campaign, but was presented as a life-experienced advocate of reason and decency. He may have appealed to some voters who had previously voted for Reiner Haseloff and to whom his successor, Sven Schulze, did not seem sufficiently supportive of the state.
But the SPD could also face difficult decisions in the coming days and weeks, depending on how the AfD behaves and what course the dispute over power and direction within the CDU takes. The Social Democrats would support any kind of cooperation between the center parties and the Left Party. The question is what they would do if the CDU opened up towards the AfD. So far, Willingmann has clearly spoken out against any openness for the AfD and has thus formulated what almost everyone in Saxony-Anhalt's social democracy thinks.
A bitter disappointment for the left
It is also impossible for the Greens to accept any form of cooperation with the AfD. That's exactly how they presented themselves in the election campaign: as the last bulwark against fascism. Their story was that a Green parliamentary group in the Magdeburg state parliament can prevent the AfD from ruling alone because with more parties in the state parliament, more percentages are needed to achieve an absolute majority of seats. After it looked in the polls a few months ago as if the Greens would no longer make it into the state parliament, they have recently been catching up. According to the projections, they were around nine percent.
For the Left Party, the projections of around nine percent are a bitter disappointment. Top candidate Eva von Angern's party had assumed that it would become the third strongest force, well ahead of the SPD and the Greens, and would then be able to make substantive demands to the CDU from a position of strength in return for votes in the state parliament. For a long time, the polls had estimated the Left at around 13 percent. But the upward trend since the federal election experienced a serious setback in Magdeburg on Sunday evening.
For the BSW, which split off from the Left Party under the leadership of Sahra Wagenknecht, on Sunday it was not just about a state election, but about the future existence of the party. After the defeat in the federal election and the internal disruption of several state associations, Saxony-Anhalt is considered Wagenknecht's last shot. If the BSW does not succeed in entering the Magdeburg state parliament there, the party is likely to also fail in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, before state elections in western countries are due again in 2027, where the BSW has not yet set foot on earth. Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar Lafontaine would have failed with their BSW experiment.
Both therefore moved away from the originally promised distance from the AfD during the election campaign and offered to promote an AfD politician in Magdeburg to the position of Prime Minister by abstaining in the third round of voting. This maneuver, which many BSW members within the party perceived as a betrayal of the ideals, was aimed at tactical AfD voters. The projections left it open whether this calculation worked. The BSW was five percent or just below.
According to the first forecast, it did not look like the FDP would make it back into the state parliament. She saw the Liberals at around two percent.
