AfD Finishes Three Seats Short of Outright Majority in Saxony-Anhalt After Historic 44% Result

Germany has been trying to figure out what happens next in a state most Germans couldn't find on a map a decade ago following Sunday's vote.

The Alternative für Deutschland won roughly 44% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt's state election on September 6, according to The Independent and The Telegraph. It's the best result any AfD branch has ever posted, more than double the party's 2021 showing in the same state. The AfD took 39 seats in the new state parliament, three short of the majority it needed to govern alone, per The Telegraph and The Independent.

Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union collapsed. The party fell from 37.1% in 2021 to about 18.5%, according to Breitbart's reporting on the exit-poll breakdown. Merz called the result "seismic," per The Independent. Outgoing CDU state premier Sven Schulze congratulated the AfD directly, telling reporters, "I think it's clear that we would all have wished for a better result in every respect," but added, "This is democracy," as quoted by Breitbart.

Four other parties cleared the 5% threshold to hold seats: Die Linke, the Greens, the SPD, and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, according to Breitbart's exit-poll figures. That fragmented result is exactly why the AfD came up short of a majority despite dominating the vote share.

Siegmund's pitch

The AfD's lead candidate, 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, is a former fragrance salesman and ex-CDU member who built a following railing against COVID mandates on TikTok, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Der Spiegel has called him "the most dangerous man in Germany," per The Independent.

Siegmund campaigned on a hardline platform: a "remigration and deportation offensive," banning rainbow flags in schools, halting new wind farm construction, changing the state's slogan from "Think modern" to "Think German," and reintroducing the singing of the national anthem in schools, according to The Guardian. He's also proposed tax breaks for large families and free childcare.

Asked by Politico's podcast whether the Holocaust was humanity's worst crime, Siegmund said he could not "presume to judge," according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which also reported he declined to condemn supporters who chanted his surname in the cadence of "Sieg Heil." Siegmund has said he would only take power with an outright majority and has offered, in his own words reported by Breitbart, to "extend my hand to all forces that will help us achieve a political turnaround."

Germany's domestic intelligence agency classifies the Saxony-Anhalt AfD as a right-wing extremist organization, a designation the party rejects as politically motivated, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The candidates behind him

The 39 incoming AfD lawmakers include some genuinely strange résumés. Phillipp-Anders Rau, who spent time with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, was accused by a rival AfD member of having appeared in professional pornography. He denied being "a porn star" but lost a defamation suit against Magdeburger Volksstimme, with a Frankfurt court ruling he "participated in filming for a professional porn video that was clearly intended for release," according to The Independent. German media also reported Rau was convicted of stealing bulk bedding from hotels and was expelled from university after using a forged diploma to enroll.

Frank-Ronald Bischoff, 78, won a constituency seat after admitting he spent 12 years as a Stasi officer suppressing anti-communist dissent in East Germany, The Telegraph reported. When Bild asked him about it in 2017, he said, "I do not comment on questions regarding the Stasi. I faithfully and conscientiously fulfilled my duties according to the laws of the GDR."

Two other winners, Simon Lansmann and Sebastian Koch, are under active police investigation over alleged ties to Artgemeinschaft, a pagan sect banned in 2023 for instructing followers to "breed only with members of the Germanic race," per The Telegraph. Police raided 15 properties, including Lansmann's dairy farm, in August. Both deny wrongdoing; Koch has described his earlier links to the neo-Nazi scene as "a phase."

What happens next

President Trump said the AfD's showing proved voters "finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly," according to The Independent. Whether that read holds up depends on what happens next, and nobody has an answer yet.

Every mainstream German party maintains what's called the Brandmauer, or firewall, refusing to govern with the AfD. Breitbart's Sunday-night coverage floated a scenario where the CDU could refuse a coalition, potentially clearing the way for the AfD to seek a minority government with support from the SPD and tacit backing from Die Linke, or alternatively for a minority coalition among the other parties to lock the AfD out. As of this reporting, no coalition has been announced, and Schulze has not said what his party intends to do. Saxony-Anhalt remains without a confirmed government, with the AfD three seats shy of the majority that would let it govern alone, waiting to see whether the firewall bends or holds.