AfD wins in Saxony-Anhalt – CDU leader Merz is looking forward to difficult weeks

For Friedrich Merz, the election in Saxony-Anhalt is a debacle, no question. The AfD is the clear election winner, and regardless of whether Ulrich Siegmund's dream of becoming the first AfD Prime Minister of a federal state comes true or not: the Chancellor and CDU chairman have difficult weeks ahead. If he dismisses the result as a mere industrial accident, he is lying to his own pocket.

As is customary, the CDU sent its general secretary in front of the cameras. She seemed visibly shocked and said in her first statement: “The result also affects us Christian Democrats.” It was not clear whether she meant the Chancellor.

But even if Merz wasn't on the ballot: Prime Minister Sven Schulze's bitter defeat is also his defeat, and above all it is a reckoning with Berlin politics. 76 percent of the voters in Saxony-Anhalt surveyed by Civey said before the election that they expected that a strong performance by the AfD in the state would also noticeably change politics at the federal level.