AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt state election, becoming first far-right party to govern German state since WWII

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won the election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to exit polls, becoming the first far-right party to do so since World War II.

The AfD won 44.5 percent of the vote, exit polls for the ARD broadcaster suggested on Sunday. That is more than twice the 18.5 percent for the incumbent centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said AfD’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund. “We have made history in this state.”

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel also hailed a “historic” result, which has given the far-right party a ‌clear mandate to govern, though it was not immediately clear whether it would be able to form a government.

“The reality is the AfD has got the lion’s share of the votes in this election, according to the exit polls. But the question is: is it enough to get them control of the state? Right now, we cannot say for sure,” reported Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane from Magdeburg in eastern Germany.

Exit polls suggest the party has narrowly missed securing an absolute majority in the state parliament in Magdeburg.

Siegmund said he wanted to extend a hand to all parties willing to bring about a fundamental political transformation in the state. However, the AfD will not bend to other parties’ will, he stressed.

The AfD has never participated in a ruling coalition in Germany’s 16 states nor its federal government, as all other mainstream parties refuse to work with it, a policy infamously known as the “firewall”.

Blow to Merz’s authority

Sunday’s result is another blow to the authority of Merz, whose popularity has declined as ‌his coalition government struggles to revive growth in Europe’s largest economy.

His centre-right CDU came a distant second. Depending on the eventual count, the CDU’s state leader, Sven Schulze, would hope to still be able to form a new multi-party coalition to block the AfD from power.

AfD has tapped into a sense of nostalgia for communist East Germany, as well as lingering resentment about the enduring wealth gap with the west decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In line with the sometimes defiant sense of local “Ossie pride”, Siegmund has often ridden the iconic local Simson bike, including to the polling booth on Sunday in his hometown of Tangermuende.

While Siegmund has been dubbed the friendly face of the AfD, his campaign promises have been radical, including targeting undocumented migrants with a “remigration and deportation offensive” from day one.

AfD’s agenda

The party’s anti-“woke” agenda also includes promises to replace LGBTQ pride rainbow flags at public schools with the German standard and to change history teaching to lessen the emphasis on Hitler’s Third Reich.

In order to replace migrant workers, the AfD wants to lure back German expatriates, while offering “baby bonuses” for families to reverse the shrinking population in the small state of 2.1 million.

The German Economic Institute has warned that the AfD’s immigration policy would be “ruinous” for Saxony-Anhalt, which is highly reliant on foreign-born workers, especially in the health sector.

Others have voiced fears that an AfD-run state security apparatus could leak sensitive information to Russia, which Moscow could use to destabilise Germany.

The Kremlin “makes no secret of the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument for destabilising Germany for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Thuringia state interior minister Georg Maier told the Handelsblatt daily newspaper.