Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has won the Saxony-Anhalt state election by a landslide, handing Ulrich Siegmund the strongest result in the party’s history and leaving it just short of an outright parliamentary majority, according to early projections as votes are still being counted.
The latest ZDF/Forschungsgruppe Wahlen Hochrechnung puts the AfD on 44.3 per cent, compared with 18.3 per cent for the governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The AfD is projected to win 41 of the 83 seats in the Landtag, one short of the 42 required to govern alone.
Die Linke stands at 9.2 per cent, while the Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens are both projected at 8.7 per cent. BSW is currently below the 5-per-cent threshold at 4.8 per cent, with the Free Democrats (FDP) on 2.4 per cent. The BSW result remains one of the key variables in the final parliamentary arithmetic.
The result signals a complete reconstruction of the eastern German state’s political balance of power compared with the previous election. In 2021, the CDU finished first with 37.1 per cent, while the AfD took 20.8 per cent. Five years later, the AfD has more than doubled its vote share, while support for the CDU has fallen by roughly half.
For Siegmund, the 35-year-old running as the AfD’s candidate for state minister-president, the result marks a historic breakthrough after a campaign in which the party increasingly presented itself not as a protest force, but as a party capable of governing and, most importantly, governing better than the current establishment. ‘We have written history in this country,’ he said after the first projections were released.
The campaign centred heavily on Siegmund himself, combining a strong physical and social media presence with extraordinary engagement numbers. That allowed the campaign to bypass much of the mainstream media and political attacks aimed at smearing both the party and its candidate. In the final phase of the campaign, Der Spiegel described Siegmund as ‘Germany’s most dangerous man’ on its cover.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said the result amounted to a clear mandate to govern. The CDU, meanwhile, is facing a collapse from first place to a distant second and an increasingly difficult question of how any government can be formed while maintaining the firewall against the AfD.
That question could dominate the remainder of election night. With the ZDF projection giving the AfD 41 seats, even a small movement in the final result could decide whether Siegmund can form Germany’s first AfD state government alone. If the party remains below an absolute majority, the other parties would have to assemble a majority against a party that has won more than twice as many votes as its nearest competitor.
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