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Chancellor Friedrich Merz describes the AfD win in Saxony-Anhalt as an existential shock for Germany and his CDU, after the far-right party surged to 43.8 percent and fell just three seats short of a parliamentary majority. Party leader Ulrich Siegmund outlines plans to become prime minister through alliances, while economists, church leaders and Holocaust survivors warn of grave consequences.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly acknowledged that Germany appeared to be on course to elect its first far-right extremist leader since May 1945, describing the result in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt as an existential shock for the country, his centre-right Christian Democratic Union ( CDU), and for himself personally.
Speaking as cameras rolled at a party board meeting in Berlin, Merz said the outcome represented the worst defeat for the CDU in years, even decades, and insisted that something had changed not only in Saxony-Anhalt but across all of Germany. The man who took office just over a year ago with a promise to halve the AfD political support instead watched as the thirteen-year-old Alternative for Germany party did the very same to his eighty-one-year-old political home in real time.
The full weight of the drama struck twelve hours earlier in the state capital Magdeburg, roughly two hundred kilometres southwest of Berlin. Around midnight, when AfD supporters learned their election night venue had run dry after two hundred and fifty litres of beer, they headed across town to crash the more subdued CDU gathering. Drinking the beer of their vanquished rivals, AfD revellers posted clips of themselves on social media singing about what victors look like.
By Monday morning, while hangover symptoms lingered, AfD leaders arrived at a Berlin press conference carrying the confident air of electoral success. The final result placed the AfD at forty-three point eight per cent, an increase of roughly twenty-three points compared with the 2021 state election but still three seats short of an outright majority.
Victorious Saxony-Anhalt AfD leader Ulrich Siegmund declared that the work to elect him prime minister had already begun, stating that his party would either lure over renegade MPs or strike strategic deals with smaller parties. He described the outcome as a historic election decisive not only for Saxony-Anhalt but for all of Germany, and vowed to help sweep through all the federal states.
Post-election analysis found that the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt enjoys above-average support across all age groups from thirty-five to sixty-nine and remains considerably more popular among men at fifty per cent than among women at thirty-nine per cent. Just eighteen women will sit in the new parliament alongside sixty-five men.
Party support emerged as a class and education issue, with only thirty per cent of voters holding university degrees backing the AfD while support rose to fifty-seven per cent among those with basic school-leaving qualifications. Fifty-nine per cent of working-class voters gave their vote to the AfD, and the party also enjoyed strong support among firm owners at fifty-two per cent.
The largest single voter group, sixty-five per cent, consisted of voters who perceived their financial situation as weak, chiming with another post-election finding that the main concern for seventy per cent of voters was the cost of living and related fears over social status. On Monday, the prospect of the first AfD-led federal state triggered alarm across German society.
Economist Clemens Fuest, head of the Munich-based Ifo Institute, warned that an AfD-led Saxony-Anhalt could expect lower levels of foreign investment, telling a magazine that in a democracy voters also have the right to vote for economic decline. Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the Catholic archbishop of Munich, called the result terrible and depressing, while prominent Holocaust survivor Charlotte Knobloch said she could not have imagined the result in her worst nightmares.
Fear was palpable across the political spectrum in Berlin, where the poll delivered another wipeout for the liberal Free Democratic Party, already ejected from the Bundestag the previous year. Back at CDU headquarters, party grandees engaged in what one described as a robust exchange of views but did not repeat rank-and-file demands for Merz to consider his position. Facing the press, the CDU leader insisted he would stand behind his government unpopular social and economic reforms
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