Dear Reader,
The upcoming state election in Saxony-Anhalt is being described as one of the most important votes in German history. You could view that as part of the hyperbole surrounding the breakdown of functioning German governance. But the narrative is not wholly without reason. And with it comes the possibility of real disruption after the vote.
At the start of campaigning a month ago, the AfD set itself the target of winning an outright majority, an extremely rare occurrence in Germany’s multi-party system. The AfD candidate for state governor, Ulrich Siegmund, has even said that he is not prepared to enter any sort of coalition. It is either all or nothing, he has said in speeches. The bombastic claim is slightly beside the point, however, as no other party seems willing to enter into a coalition with the populist group.
Winning an overall majority would be quite the way for the AfD to elect its first state leader. The only time it has previously won the largest share of the vote, in Thuringia in 2024, an unwritten law of German parliamentarianism would suggest that it had the right to build a coalition. Instead, it was shut out by the other parties. The result was a coalition in which a CDU minister-president is reliant on the anti-capitalist Die Linke party to pass legislation.
If the AfD pulls off this feat, it will be the first time that a party to the right of the CDU has taken control of a state parliament in the history of modern Germany.
At the start of campaigning in July, polling showed the AfD on 43 percent. With the right maths of smaller parties failing to make the 5 percent cut-off, that could be enough to give it an overall majority of seats. Since then, though, the party’s polling share has dropped slightly to around 40 percent, making the chances of an outright majority somewhat thinner.
For Germany, which takes its historic responsibility to keep far-right parties out of government very seriously, it would be a watershed moment – and the clearest proof yet that centrist parties’ previous attempts to win back voters from the AfD have been a complete failure.
Why might Saxony-Anhalt in particular be the place where the AfD scores its first major election victory? Timing, no doubt, plays a role. The results of state elections are as much a statement on voter satisfaction with federal politics as they are about any local issue. Friedrich Merz’s government is historically unpopular – no mean feat given the disregard in which his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, was held. In voting for the AfD, voters are rejecting a centrist consensus that they blame for inflation, higher living costs and job losses in manufacturing.
But state capital Magdeburg was also the site of the worst in a long line of massacres committed by migrants from the Middle East against the local population. Two years ago, shortly before Christmas, a man called Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a 4x4 into the packed Weihnachtsmarkt in the city centre, ploughing the vehicle through the narrow alleys. Eyewitnesses later recounted harrowing scenes of the wheels spinning over a pile of crushed bodies. Six people, the youngest just nine years old, died in the atrocity. Over 300 more were injured.
Strikingly, that crime has barely featured in the discussion of why the people of Saxony-Anhalt have swung in such great numbers towards the AfD, which has put the far-right Kampfbegriff “remigration” front and centre of its manifesto.