Germany’s Alternative for Germany entered Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election with a commanding polling lead and a possible path to an outright parliamentary majority, a result that could allow the party to govern a state without coalition partners for the first time.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Voters in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls Sunday in an election that could fundamentally alter the country’s postwar political landscape, with the Alternative for Germany entering the vote above 40% in recent surveys and potentially within reach of governing without a coalition.
About 1.7 million eligible voters have until 6 p.m. local time to cast ballots in the state of just over 2 million people.
The AfD, led in Saxony-Anhalt by 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, has maintained a substantial advantage over Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union for months.
Recent polling tracked by the independent German election website Wahlrecht.de placed the AfD at approximately 41%, compared with about 23% for the CDU.
That does not automatically translate into an outright parliamentary majority.
Germany’s proportional electoral system generally makes single-party governments difficult to achieve. But parties receiving less than 5% of the vote normally receive no representation in the Landtag, meaning votes cast for them do not contribute to the distribution of most parliamentary seats.
With several smaller parties hovering near or below that threshold, an AfD vote share in the low-to-mid 40s could potentially translate into more than half of the seats.
That possibility gives Sunday’s election significance extending well beyond Saxony-Anhalt.
No party outside the center-left Social Democratic Party, or SPD, and the center-right CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, has won a single-party governing majority in a German state since the Federal Republic was established in 1949.
An AfD majority would also allow the party to circumvent Germany’s longstanding political “Brandmauer,” or “firewall,” under which the established parties refuse to enter governing coalitions with it.
The firewall has prevented the AfD from turning strong election results into executive power even as its support has expanded at both state and federal levels.
Siegmund has ruled out solving that problem through a coalition of his own.
He has said the AfD should instead win enough seats to govern outright, setting a goal of at least 45% of the vote.
At his final campaign rally in Magdeburg on Saturday, Siegmund presented the state election as part of a broader national political transformation.
“No matter the outcome of tomorrow’s election, we have already made history,” he said.
“Because what we have started here in Saxony-Anhalt — that is currently sweeping across all of Germany — can no longer be stopped.”
Siegmund arrived to vote Sunday in his hometown of Tangermuende on a blue Simson moped, where supporters gathered to greet him.
His political rise has been fueled partly by an unusually large social-media following.
Siegmund has accumulated more than 700,000 followers on TikTok — an audience equivalent to roughly one-third of the population of the state in which he is seeking to become minister-president.
A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis described the approach behind his appeal.
His “polished appearance and professional tone lend respectability, and radical demands blend with footage of a community-oriented politician responding to audience questions… The AfD’s physical presence in the streets and omnipresence in the media helps to push the common populist ‘us versus them’ narrative: The AfD is here for you, the other parties are not.”
Young voters have become particularly important to the AfD’s growth.
The CSIS report said the party’s “strongest recent gains have been among voters 18–25 years old, where the party tripled its results compared to the 2021 national election.”
Economic concerns have contributed to that movement, according to analysts cited in the source material, as younger Germans contend with higher living costs and concerns about employment.
Treiber said economics is pushing younger voters toward the AfD because of rising expenses and unemployment.
At the same time, he said the youth vote is “kind of polarized because the other part of the youth in Germany is voting for the left party (Die Linke).”
Migration has become another central issue.
The AfD has campaigned for significantly tighter immigration policies, and national co-chair Alice Weidel has advocated closing Germany’s borders and withdrawing from Europe’s Schengen open-border arrangement.
“Illegal migration, unchecked open borders, anyone can get in. Our internal security is suffering. People are honestly fed up with this situation,” Weidel said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF.
She also called for Syrians who received refugee protection in Germany to return home.
“All Syrian refugees must have their protected status revoked because the reason for their flight no longer exists. These people must return to their homeland. If they don’t leave voluntarily, then they must be deported by force.”
Weidel additionally criticized the naturalization of Syrians living in Germany.
“We must stop naturalizing these people who should actually be leaving our country. We have Islamization.”
The AfD’s positions and growing support have generated sustained controversy over how Germany’s political institutions should respond to the party.
In May 2025, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, classified the national AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization, citing positions involving migration and an ancestry-based conception of German identity.
That nationwide classification was subsequently put on hold amid legal proceedings.
A German court said in February that although there was evidence of potentially unconstitutional statements and policies within the AfD, the available evidence was insufficient to characterize the entire national party as extremist while the dispute was being adjudicated.
The AfD rejects the extremist characterization.
The debate has done little to prevent the party from expanding electorally.
It won 20.8% of the vote in Germany’s February 2025 federal election, becoming the second-largest force in the Bundestag and the country’s official parliamentary opposition.
Sunday’s election represents a different test: whether that growing support can translate into direct control of a government.
The AfD has said that if it governs Saxony-Anhalt, it intends to pursue more traditional policies in schools and cultural institutions, substantially tighten policies affecting immigration and overhaul the public broadcasting system.
Critics of the party have also accused it of taking positions favorable to Russia.
The AfD’s increased prominence has placed pressure on Merz, whose federal government has attempted to respond to voter concerns over immigration and public security with stricter policies of its own.
Saxony-Anhalt is consequently being watched as a measure of whether that strategy has slowed the AfD’s rise.
The polling immediately before Sunday suggested it had not.
Incumbent state premier Sven Schulze’s CDU remained more than a dozen points behind the AfD despite Schulze himself polling strongly when voters were asked whom they preferred personally as state leader.
Merz has warned that an AfD government could also damage Saxony-Anhalt economically.
“I cannot imagine international investors attending a ground-breaking ceremony with an AfD Minister-President to set up new plants and establish new businesses in Saxony-Anhalt… However, that is a decision for the voters in Saxony-Anhalt to make. The state will suffer considerable damage if things turn out as we now fear they might,” Merz recently told state broadcaster ARD.
If the AfD fails to win a parliamentary majority, the arithmetic becomes considerably more complicated.
The CDU would likely attempt to construct another governing arrangement under Schulze.
Its current coalition, however, appears unlikely to survive in its present form.
The Free Democratic Party has been polling below the 5% threshold needed for parliamentary representation, while the SPD has been running below 10%.
The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, has also been polling below 5%.
BSW is particularly significant because it is the only party discussed in the source material that has not categorically ruled out cooperation with the AfD.
The CDU, meanwhile, has ruled out governing with both the AfD and the far-left Left Party.
That drastically narrows Schulze’s options.
A coalition between the CDU, SPD and Greens might still fall short of a majority depending on the final results.
One possible alternative would be a CDU-led minority government that survives with passive support from the Left without formally bringing it into the governing coalition.
A comparable arrangement has been used in neighboring Thuringia.
The uncertainty means the parties that barely clear — or fail to clear — the 5% threshold could have an unusually large effect on who governs Saxony-Anhalt.
The mechanics can appear counterintuitive.
“German voters cast two ballots,” Schatz said. “One for a local candidate — like voting for your congressman – and one for a party. That second vote, the party vote, is the one that counts. It decides how many seats each party gets in parliament.”
“But there is a caveat: Any party that falls below 5% gets nothing — zero seats — and those votes are effectively thrown out. Right now, several smaller parties are hovering right at that line. If they miss it, 42% or 43% of the vote can translate into more than half the seats. So Saxony-Anhalt could wake up to an AfD majority government even though a clear majority of voters chose someone else. That would be a first in postwar Germany.”
The mechanism makes an outright majority mathematically possible without receiving more than 50% of all votes cast, depending on how many votes go to parties excluded from seat allocation.
For the AfD, Saxony-Anhalt is also part of a longer-term national strategy.
The party is looking toward Germany’s next scheduled federal election in 2029 and views success in eastern state elections as a potential bridge from opposition politics to executive power.
The state is already one of the strongest parts of the country for the AfD.
The CSIS analysis found that some voters support the party because of its more radical positions while others vote for it despite reservations about them.
The report said 60.5% of AfD voters displayed what its underlying research categorized as a right-wing extremist worldview.
It also found that more than two in five AfD voters believed the party did not sufficiently distance itself from right-wing extremist positions.
Those findings illustrate the tension surrounding the AfD’s electoral growth: its increasingly broad voter base exists alongside continued scrutiny from intelligence authorities, rival parties and civil-society organizations over elements of its ideology.
Saxony-Anhalt may not be the only eastern state testing that dynamic this month.
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where former Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up and began her political career, is scheduled to vote in two weeks.
Polling cited in the source material puts the AfD at approximately 35% there compared with 32% for the governing SPD.
Berlin voters are also scheduled to go to the polls in two weeks, although the political landscape in the capital is markedly different.
Recent polling averages have placed the Left and CDU at approximately 20% each, the AfD around 18%, and the Greens and SPD near 15%.
While the AfD’s strongest support remains concentrated in Germany’s former communist east, it has established a nationwide institutional presence.
The party is represented in 14 of Germany’s 16 state legislatures and holds 15 of Germany’s 96 seats in the European Parliament.
It also enters the Saxony-Anhalt contest less than two years after Elon Musk publicly supported the AfD during Germany’s 2025 federal campaign.
Sunday’s vote could now determine whether that national rise reaches another milestone.
If the AfD wins the most votes but falls short of a majority, Germany’s political firewall could remain intact while rival parties undertake difficult coalition negotiations.
If Siegmund secures enough seats to govern alone, the firewall would become irrelevant in Saxony-Anhalt because the AfD would no longer need another party’s cooperation to take power.
That distinction makes the state’s proportional election system — and the fate of several parties clustered around the 5% threshold — almost as consequential as the AfD’s own vote share.
For decades, Germany’s established parties have been able to keep the AfD and its predecessors outside executive power through coalition arithmetic.
Saxony-Anhalt voters are now deciding whether that arithmetic still holds.
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