MAGDEBURG, Germany—Voters in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt elect a new legislature on Sunday in a contest that could hand the Alternative for Germany (AfD) its first state government.
The final ZDF Politbarometer, published on Sept. 3, put the AfD at 41 percent, 18 points ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU).
Such a result would nearly double the AfD’s 20.8 percent share it won in the 2021 state election, when the CDU, which has led Saxony-Anhalt since 2002, won 37.1 percent. The AfD already demonstrated its growing strength in the state in the February 2025 federal election, when it took 37.1 percent of the vote.
Anna Nguyen, an AfD member of the state parliament of Hesse in western Germany, told The Epoch Times that an electoral victory on Sunday would mark “a historic moment” for the country.
“For the first time, neither of the two big traditional parties, the CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD), would be in power in a state,” she said.
The prospect has prompted starkly different assessments from the AfD’s political opponents.
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Saxony-Anhalt Minister-President Sven Schulze, the center-right CDU’s lead candidate, has stated that an AfD victory would “inflict indescribable damage on the state of Saxony-Anhalt and on all of Germany.”
Forty-one percent of the vote would not necessarily translate into an outright majority in the state parliament. Much will depend on how many votes go to parties that fail to clear Germany’s 5 percent threshold.
The Politbarometer put the Free Democrats at 3 percent and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance at 4 percent. Even so, its authors assessed an outright AfD majority as unlikely. Based on these projections, the Left Party, the SPD, and the Greens will enter the state parliament.
All or Nothing
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s 35-year-old lead candidate, has ruled out governing as a junior partner and said he will seek the post of minister-president only if his party wins enough seats to govern alone.
At the AfD’s “family festival” in Magdeburg on Friday, Siegmund suggested that falling short this time would merely postpone his party’s path to power. If the CDU proved unable to assemble a durable coalition, he told supporters, the resulting political deadlock would eventually force new elections, and the AfD would then win 50 or even 60 percent of the vote.
His platform includes an immediate “remigration and deportation” drive targeting illegal immigrants, a halt to the construction of new wind farms, tax cuts, and the cancellation of state treaties that fund public broadcasting.
The Firewall’s Dilemma
If the AfD falls short of a majority, attention will shift to Germany’s political “firewall,” the refusal of the country’s other major parties to enter into coalitions with the AfD. With the AfD potentially taking more than 40 percent of the vote, maintaining that firewall could leave the CDU with few options for assembling a majority.
Merz has ruled out coalitions with both the AfD and the far left Die Linke, the successor to East Germany’s ruling communist party. He told German public broadcaster ARD on Aug. 30 that the CDU would do “everything we can to prevent Saxony-Anhalt from falling into the hands of the radicals.”
Merz said that the CDU would assess its options once the results were known, and that an AfD-led government could deter foreign investment in the state.
In neighboring Thuringia, the CDU’s Mario Voigt has governed since 2024 with votes lent by the Left. Saxony-Anhalt’s voters are cool on that route. Infratest dimap’s final survey for public broadcaster MDR found 59 percent critical of a CDU-led government propped up by the Left, with CDU supporters split evenly.
Nguyen attributed the persistence of the firewall to what she called “the demonization of the AfD by the left, and a left-wing ideology that has taken hold in the country since the 1970s.”
The lawmaker, whose parents fled communist Vietnam, said labels such as “Nazi” and “racist” are used against her party to keep it from challenging the political status quo. She argued that the left sets the direction of policy in Germany, while the CDU, once returned to power, does little to reverse course.
Alexander Sell, an AfD member of the European Parliament, said the firewall could ultimately force the CDU toward the very party it has also pledged not to govern with. He told The Epoch Times that the Christian Democrats could find themselves dependent on the Social Democrats and “the communists of the Left.”
“It would be a disaster for the Christian Democrats,” Sell said. “The Left is the party of the East German socialist dictatorship.”
The possibility of a dramatically larger AfD presence in the next legislature has already prompted changes to the rules governing the state parliament.
In April, the CDU, the Left, the SPD, the Free Democrats, and the Greens approved a constitutional reform over the objections of the AfD. Among other changes, it makes it harder for a single large parliamentary faction to block the election of the parliament’s president or constitutional court judges and requires a parliamentary majority to cancel state treaties.
The AfD’s Oliver Kirchner described the reform as the product of “fear of the election result.”
Why the East Votes AfD
The AfD’s strength in eastern Germany has long fueled debate over “Ostalgie,” nostalgia for aspects of life in the former East Germany, and the enduring political legacy of four decades of communist rule.
In a 2021 interview with the FAZ Podcast für Deutschland, Marco Wanderwitz, then the federal government’s commissioner for eastern Germany, caused controversy when he said that some eastern Germans held “non-democratic views” and had been “socialized by a dictatorship” in ways that left them less firmly rooted in democracy.
Sell said nostalgia for certain aspects of the past does exist, particularly for the stronger sense of social cohesion that some eastern Germans associate with the period before reunification. But he rejected the idea that such nostalgia explains the AfD’s strength.
Instead, he argued that the experience of communist rule had left many eastern Germans more skeptical of political institutions and media narratives, a tendency that, in his view, frustrates parts of Germany’s political establishment.
“East Germans have a very fine sense for when a system no longer works,” Sell said. Many western Germans “watch the evening news and think they are being told the truth,” while East Germans “learned once that you cannot believe what you are told on television.”
“They also hold politicians responsible for the fact that they are poor, while those same politicians focus on mass migration, which is erasing their identity, and on a green transition that only makes their economic situation worse.”
Nguyen, who joined the AfD in 2018 over mass immigration and deindustrialization, told The Epoch Times that the party’s strength among younger voters was due to its social media reach and to their daily experience of Islamic migration and economic hardship.
Nationally, the AfD leads the September ARD DeutschlandTrend at 27 percent, with Merz’s Union at its lowest level in more than four years. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD also leads the polls, and Berlin vote on Sept. 20.
For Nguyen, Sunday will confirm a realignment already under way. “In reality, the AfD is today the only right-wing party in Germany,” she said.
