Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt by a margin without precedent in the party’s history. Preliminary official results put the AfD on 43.8 per cent of the vote — more than double the 17.2 per cent taken by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the party that has led the state government since 2002.

Projections for the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, based on exit polls and early counting, had put the figure a little higher still, in the range of 44 to 44.5 per cent. Whichever number the final count settles on, it represents roughly a doubling of the party’s 20.8 per cent from the last state election in 2021.

What it does not yet represent is a government.

Votes are not seats

Saxony-Anhalt’s parliament, the Landtag, sits in Magdeburg and has a baseline of 83 seats, with additional overhang and levelling seats added if needed to keep the chamber proportional. A majority requires half of whatever the final number turns out to be.

The state uses a five per cent threshold: a party that finishes below it receives no seats at all, and its votes are effectively redistributed among the parties that cleared the bar. Going into Sunday, several parties were polling close to that line — the Greens, the FDP and the newer BSW among them. If enough of them fell short, a large block of votes would go unrepresented, and the parties above the threshold would each end up with more seats than their raw vote share suggests.

That arithmetic is why a party polling in the low forties was, before the count, plausibly in reach of an outright majority of seats. It is also why the final seat allocation matters more than the headline percentage, and why it was not immediately clear on Sunday night whether the AfD would be able to form the first far-right-led state government in Germany since the Second World War.

The firewall, and the argument about it

Every other party represented in German state and federal parliaments currently observes what is known in German politics as the Brandmauer — the firewall — a commitment not to enter coalition with or rely on the votes of the AfD. Domestic intelligence services in several states have classified branches of the party as extremist, and senior politicians across the mainstream parties have argued for years that cooperation would normalise it.

Defenders of the firewall make roughly three arguments. The first is constitutional: Germany’s postwar political order was deliberately built with safeguards against anti-democratic parties, and those safeguards are meaningless if they are set aside the moment such a party polls well. The second is practical: coalition partners share responsibility for a government’s record, and mainstream parties that have governed with the hard right elsewhere in Europe have often lost ground to it rather than tamed it. The third is about voters: a firewall makes clear that a vote for the AfD is a vote that cannot produce a government, which supporters of the policy argue is an honest signal rather than a trick.

Critics of the firewall — including the AfD itself, but not only the AfD — make arguments that run the other way. They contend that excluding the largest party in a chamber from any share of power invites the charge that elections do not decide anything, and that the charge is politically useful to the excluded party. They point out that the policy requires parties with little in common to govern together, producing coalitions that are unstable and unpopular, which in turn feeds the vote they were assembled to contain. And some argue that a party that consistently wins two-fifths of the vote in a state cannot be treated indefinitely as an aberration without the treatment itself becoming the story.

Both sides have been making these arguments for the better part of a decade. Sunday’s result does not settle the dispute. It raises the cost of whichever answer the other parties choose.

Why Saxony-Anhalt

Saxony-Anhalt is a state of roughly 2.1 million people in eastern Germany, west of Berlin. Like much of the former East, it has lost population steadily since reunification, particularly among younger working-age residents, and its industrial base was substantially dismantled in the 1990s. The AfD has polled consistently stronger in the eastern states than in the west for most of its existence.

The party’s lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, has spent several years building an operation in the state that other AfD branches have studied. On Sunday night he told supporters the party had achieved exactly what it set out to achieve and had made history in the state. Party co-leader Alice Weidel called the result historic.

The vote is also a marker for the two state elections that follow within a fortnight — Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — and, more distantly, for the CDU’s position nationally. Merz became chancellor promising to win back voters who had moved to the AfD. In Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, his party finished more than twenty-six points behind it.

What is not known yet

The final seat count, and therefore whether a majority is arithmetically available to the AfD alone. Whether the CDU, SPD, Left and Greens can assemble a working majority between them, and if so on what terms. Whether any of the smaller parties cleared five per cent. And whether the state can be governed at all without one of those two things being true — because if neither is, Saxony-Anhalt faces either a minority government or a fresh election.

Those answers will arrive over days and weeks, not hours. The percentage is the part of the story that fits in a headline. The seats are the part that decides who runs the state.

Sources

• Al Jazeera, preliminary official results, 6 September 2026
• NPR and Associated Press, ARD/ZDF projections, 6 September 2026
• Landtag of Saxony-Anhalt, composition and electoral system
• Forschungsgruppe Wahlen for ZDF, pre-election polling, 3 September 2026