The AfD leads the polls in Saxony-Anhalt and is approaching its first regional victory

The Eurosceptic party that burst into German politics thirteen years ago under the name of Alternative for Germany (AfD), and grew in votes as it radicalized towards the far right without ever managing to govern, is now considering the possibility of finally achieving it.

Saxony-Anhalt, a sparsely populated eastern German land, holds elections this Sunday, and the latest poll places the AfD as the most voted party with 43%, compared to 22% for the Christian Democrats CDU. The ultras would thus remain at the gates of an absolute majority, the only formula that would allow them to avoid the firewall (Brandmauer) with which the other parties have always excluded them from federal, regional and local government coalitions.

However, there remains the possibility that smaller parties will not gain parliamentary representation, which could give the AfD more seats with that same percentage.

The candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, wants to “make history,” as he says, obtaining for the party what would be its first regional presidency. He is encouraged by the federal co-presidents, Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, convinced that this time the AfD will come to power.

Founded in February 2013 by conservative and nationalist economists irritated by the euro crisis, the party later evolved towards the extreme right, making the rejection of immigration and Islam its great electoral argument. In 2014 he gained representation in the European Parliament and entered a German regional Parliament for the first time, that of Saxony.

Then, the humanitarian crisis of 2015, which moved the conservative Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to open borders to refugees and which led to the arrival of more than a million people from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, became the great xenophobic asset for the AfD.

That same year, the founding president, the economist Bernd Lucke, was defenestrated by the leader of the hard wing, the Saxon Frauke Petry. Progressively, the party set foot in all the chambers of the 16 länder – although its fiefdoms are in the east, it also has a presence in the west – and in 2017 it made a splash by managing to enter the Bundestag (Lower House of the federal Parliament) with 12.6% of the votes.

Internal disputes between the hard line and the pragmatic line led the ultras to lose steam in the following federal elections in 2021, and to chain different leaders while the hard line was redoubled until it became very hard.

Thus, in the early elections of February 2025 – those that brought the conservative Friedrich Merz to the Chancellery – the AfD soared to become the second force with 20.8%. And in the midst of an upward spiral, federal polls have been giving them first place for months, with up to 29% support, to the detriment of Merz's CDU/CSU alliance, which is around 21%.

Its current program combines rhetoric against immigration, multiculturalism and Islam; identity nationalism, including historical revisionism about the Nazi regime; and an important socioeconomic aspect, seeking to win over those who feel neglected by the system. In the case of eastern voters, it also cultivates discomfort with “the elites of Berlin” and a certain nostalgia for the days of the communist GDR, which includes doses of sympathy towards Russia despite the war in Ukraine.

The AfD also has the dishonor of being observed by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the intelligence services of the Ministry of the Interior, as "suspected of right-wing extremism." Reason: according to the BfV, some of its postulates are “incompatible with the democratic constitutional order.”

In addition to Saxony-Anhalt this Sunday, September 20 is also on the horizon. There will be elections in another eastern state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD leads the polls with 35%, but where the prospects of participating in the future government coalition are zero. That day elections are also held in Berlin, an eastern land but with different electoral behavior. In the capital, the AfD is around 18%, on par with other formations in the fray.

In any case, the far-right party is now brimming with self-confidence. “We will govern a federal state for the first time,” Alice Weidel said a few days ago in an interview on the public broadcaster ZDF, where she also stated that “the CDU will never win federal elections again.”