AfD Wins Saxony-Anhalt State Election with 43.8% but Falls Short of Majority

Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8% of the vote, according to the preliminary official result released Sunday, giving the party its strongest showing ever in a German state election but leaving it short of an outright majority.

The preliminary seat allocation in the 83-seat Landtag, the state legislature, gave AfD 39 seats, ahead of the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, on 15. The Social Democrats won 8 seats, the Greens 8, The Left 8 and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW, 5. A majority is 42 seats, leaving AfD three short of governing alone. That leaves coalition arithmetic unresolved because the CDU, Social Democrats, Greens and The Left have all said they will not cooperate with AfD, while BSW has not categorically ruled out talks and is now central to what happens next.

The CDU won 17.2% of the vote, followed by the Social Democrats on 9.3%, the Greens on 8.9%, The Left on 8.6% and BSW on 5.3%, according to the state election authority’s preliminary final result. The Free Democrats took about 2.6% and failed to clear the 5% threshold for representation. Turnout was 77.8%, reported as the highest in Saxony-Anhalt since German reunification.

The result was historically significant beyond the immediate deadlock. Independent German and international outlets, citing the official tally, described it as the best result AfD has ever posted in a state election in Germany. It also more than doubled the party’s vote share in the last Saxony-Anhalt state election in 2021, when it won about 20.8%.

AfD leaders celebrated the outcome. Co-leader Alice Weidel called it “sensational” and said, “we have received a very clear mandate to govern here.” Sven Schulze, the incumbent CDU minister-president of Saxony-Anhalt, acknowledged the scale of the setback, saying, “we as the CDU will also have to deal with this result.”

Any path from election victory to executive power is especially sensitive in Saxony-Anhalt. The state branch of AfD was classified in 2023 by Saxony-Anhalt’s domestic intelligence agency as a “proven right-wing extremist effort,” a designation reported by German media and repeatedly cited in coverage of Sunday’s vote. That classification has added to the political pressure on other parties to keep their distance from AfD even as it emerged as the clear winner.

The result is also an early political test for Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, with independent coverage describing the vote as a major setback for the party and another sign of AfD’s strength in eastern Germany. But the immediate question is not who came first; it is who can assemble a workable governing majority in a chamber where AfD has the most seats but not enough to govern on its own.

Under state rules, the newly elected Landtag must convene within 30 days of the election, meaning by Oct. 6, and will then elect a minister-president.