First since 1945: Germany shaken as far-right AfD triumphs in Saxony-Anhalt state poll

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has broken a taboo that has held since 1945. In Saxony-Anhalt's state election held on Sunday, the far-right party won 44.2 per cent of the vote, more than double its 2021 tally, and came within three seats of an outright majority in the state parliament. It is the first time since World War II that a far-right party has topped a German state poll, and the result has sent tremors through Berlin and several European capitals as well.

The scale of the collapse on the other side tells its own story. The Christian Democratic Union, which has governed Saxony-Anhalt for years under the respected veteran Reiner Haseloff, crashed from 37.1 per cent in 2021 to just 17.4 per cent under his successor Sven Schulze. CDU national leader and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz left party headquarters in Berlin without a word, a silence that spoke to how badly the result had wounded him.

Turnout was exceptionally high at 76.7 per cent, showing that this was no protest vote. The AfD's Saxony-Anhalt leader Ulrich Siegmund rode a Simson Schwalbe, an East German motorcycle from the communist era, to his polling station, a small gesture that captured his wider pitch. He leaned hard into eastern pride, framed his party as the voice of ordinary working people, and promised a 2000 euro "baby welcome grant" for a family's first two children. He also vowed to strip rainbow flags from schools and trim lessons on Germany's Nazi past, tapping a strain of resentment against what some on the right call a guilt cult.

Economic grievance did much of the heavy lifting. Saxony-Anhalt has the lowest average net income of any German state, and seven in ten voters told pollsters they feared they could not keep up with their bills. Immigration fears compounded the anxiety, with the AfD promising a hardline deportation drive targeting undocumented migrants from its first day in office. And there is already a major resentment in the former East German states that Berlin funds Ukraine generously while their woes continue unabated.

Yet the AfD's convincing win still leaves it short of power. It took 39 of 83 seats, three shy of the 42 needed to govern alone, and the mainstream parties maintain a firewall that bars coalition with a movement Germany's domestic intelligence service classifies as confirmed far-right extremist. The Greens and the upstart far-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance both cleared the five per cent threshold, and had the Wagenknecht party fallen short, the arithmetic would likely have handed Siegmund outright majority.

What happens next is genuinely unclear. Schulze could attempt an unwieldy five-party coalition stretching from his own CDU to the left, though the CDU refuses to work with the left and the Wagenknecht bloc refuses to support Schulze. Siegmund, for his part, has ruled out leading a minority government but has openly invited defections from CDU ranks, and the Wagenknecht party has signalled it could cooperate with the AfD informally on selected issues. Siegmund has also raised the prospect of fresh elections, predicting his party would take 50 to 55 per cent should voters go back to the polls.

The reverberations reach well beyond Saxony-Anhalt. SPD leader Lars Klingbeil called the result a signal to Berlin, a rejection of federal policy that he described as truly dramatic. Talk has already begun of a possible chancellor swap within the CDU before the next federal election, given how badly Merz's standing has been dented. Green co-leader Felix Banaszak, whose party survived the night, said there was no reason to celebrate given what a far-right state government would mean for Germany.

Security analysts have raised another concern: that an AfD government could compromise intelligence sharing given the party's warmth towards Moscow, epitomised by party leader Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who was criticised for keeping a Russian army mug on display in his office.