The Alternative for Germany won 44.2 per cent of the party vote in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election, more than doubling its 2021 result of 20.8 per cent.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU fell to 17.1 per cent, a stark reversal for a party that has governed the state since 2002. Other parties can likely still keep the AfD out of government through a coalition, but that arithmetic looks increasingly fragile when the excluded party wins nearly half the vote.
The East Votes Differently
Saxony-Anhalt is an extreme version of a broader trend, since the AfD has consistently performed far better across the former East German states than in the west. Dissatisfaction with established parties has grown steadily more entrenched there as well.
Economic history helps explain part of it, since Saxony-Anhalt has lost more than a quarter of its population since reunification, while younger workers have repeatedly moved west in search of better opportunities.
Income, wealth and senior institutional representation still show East-West differences more than three decades after reunification. Those disparities cannot mechanically explain a vote for the AfD, but they help sustain a feeling that national institutions were built elsewhere and are run by people with different experiences.
Migration then gives that frustration a highly visible political target.
Migration Turns into a Symbol
Saxony-Anhalt has a comparatively low foreign-born population, yet immigration featured heavily in the campaign. AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund promised faster deportations and stronger restrictions while presenting immigration as evidence that Berlin ignores local preferences.
That apparent contradiction carries real weight, since political concern about migration does not necessarily rise in proportion to the number of migrants living nearby.
It can instead work as shorthand for control, cultural change and distrust of government. External figures have helped amplify that message, since Elon Musk publicly encouraged Germans to support the AfD and hosted party leader Alice Weidel on X, while senior figures in the Trump administration have criticised German efforts to isolate the party.
Yet importing American culture-war explanations would miss much of the result, since voters in Saxony-Anhalt also cited wages, disappearing jobs, regional decline and distrust of institutions rooted in specifically German experiences.
The Firewall Faces Pressure
The AfD still appears short of an outright parliamentary majority, and the other major parties have ruled out coalition agreements, which may keep it from the state premiership. But exclusion creates another problem once a party wins more than 44 per cent.
Building governments around the largest party grows increasingly complicated, and the resulting coalitions can reinforce the AfD’s argument that traditional parties will cooperate with almost anybody to keep it out.
None of that requires normalising the AfD’s more radical positions. Parts of the party have promoted concepts of remigration, challenged Germany’s culture of Nazi remembrance and expressed unusually sympathetic positions towards Russia.
Mainstream parties still have to confront why those positions no longer stop millions of voters from supporting it. Germany can maintain its firewall, but it cannot use one to wall off the reasons 44 per cent of voters walked towards the AfD in the first place.
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