- Lead. The AfD won 43.8 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6 — its highest share ever in a German state election — but cannot form a government because every other party refuses to serve as its coalition partner.
- Fact. Voter turnout hit 77.8 percent, up from 60 percent in 2021, suggesting the result reflects a surge in engagement, not merely a collapse of rivals.
- Stake. A prolonged government vacuum in one of Germany’s poorest states will intensify pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, which collapsed from 40.9 percent to 17.2 percent.
Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland swept Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election with 43.8 percent of the vote, according to final results published by Bloomberg, winning 38 of the state’s 41 direct constituencies. The result represents a near-doubling of the party’s 2021 performance of 20.8 percent and is the highest vote share the AfD has recorded in any German state election since the party’s founding.
The Numbers
The Saxony-Anhalt Landtag now comprises 83 seats following a reduction from 97. The AfD won 39 of those seats — 16 more than in 2021 — but falls three short of the 42 needed for an outright majority. The CDU, which governed the state continuously since 1994, was reduced to 15 seats, a loss of 25. The SPD, Greens and Die Linke each won eight seats, while the new BSW party crossed the five-percent threshold with five seats. The FDP, with 2.6 percent, was shut out entirely. The high turnout of 77.8 percent undercuts one common narrative that AfD gains are driven by passive abstention among centre-right voters: this was a contested election, and the AfD won it decisively.
Coalition Deadlock
Germany’s so-called Brandmauer — the firewall that bars all parties from entering government with the AfD — means the election’s winner cannot govern. No arithmetically plausible coalition of the remaining parties reaches 42 seats without the AfD. The most-discussed scenario is a CDU-led minority government that relies on ad-hoc tolerance votes from Die Linke, but Merz has ruled out any formal cooperation with the left, telling reporters after the results that he would not negotiate across the firewall in either direction. As polling ahead of the vote had signalled, the CDU’s decline left it too small to anchor a majority even with the Greens, SPD and BSW together.
National Implications
Saxony-Anhalt is the first German state where the AfD has topped 40 percent in a final result, and the CDU’s halving of its vote share in a state it has held for three decades raises immediate questions about the party’s Eastern Germany strategy. The result arrives while Merz’s federal government is navigating its first year in office; an extended Saxony-Anhalt stalemate will provide the AfD with a sustained platform to argue that the firewall is anti-democratic. Sweden and other Nordic countries that have seen far-right normalisation warn that minority-government tolerance arrangements can gradually erode the containment model over multiple election cycles.