According to exit polls, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won the elections in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD won 44.2 percent of the vote, according to exit polls by the ARD channel on Sunday. This is more than double the 17.4 percent of the current center-right Christian Democratic party (CDU), led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said AfD leading candidate Ulrich Siegmund. “We have made history in this state.” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel also praised the “historic” result, which gave the far-right party a clear mandate to govern, although it was not immediately clear whether it would be able to form a government. Merz did not make any statement Sunday night about the election results. The German leader left the CDU headquarters, the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, after 10:00 p.m. local time (8:00 p.m. GMT). “The reality is that the AfD has won the majority of the votes in these elections, according to exit polls. But the question is: is it enough to get them control of the state? At the moment, we can’t say for sure,” Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane reported from Magdeburg in eastern Germany. The latest projections gave the AfD 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, leaving it three short of the 42 needed for an absolute majority in the state parliament in Magdeburg. Siegmund said he wanted to extend a hand to all parties interested in achieving a fundamental political transformation in the state. However, the AfD will not bend to the will of other parties, he emphasized. The AfD has never participated in a governing coalition in Germany’s 16 states, nor in its federal government, as all other major parties refuse to work with it, a policy infamously known as the “firewall.” Tino Chrupalla, the AfD’s national co-leader, said the result showed that voters had rejected the government coalition’s policy. The main parties “were eliminated, or rather, the voters delivered a clear verdict, and I can only encourage them to recognize that the ‘firewall’ has been definitively rejected by the voters today,” Chrupalla told broadcaster ARD. The AfD branch in Saxony-Anhalt has been classified as a confirmed far-right organization by the state’s national intelligence agency, a designation the party rejects as politically motivated. Blow to Merz’s authority Sunday’s result is another blow to the authority of Merz, whose popularity has declined as the coalition government struggles to revive growth in Europe’s largest economy. His center-right CDU came a distant second. The current Prime Minister of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, Sven Schulze, congratulated the AfD and acknowledged that the result had hit his party hard, saying: “We are going to have to live with this result.” Schulze later said he had no intention of cooperating with the AfD, although he initially refused to give a clear answer when asked whether the CDU firewall would remain in place. The projected parliamentary arithmetic would make forming a government exceptionally difficult. Schulze could try to form an alliance involving several parties, although the CDU has traditionally ruled out formal cooperation with both the AfD and the left-wing party (Die Linke). The AfD has tapped into a sense of nostalgia for communist East Germany, as well as a lingering resentment over the enduring wealth gap with the West decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In keeping with the sometimes defiant sense of local “Ossie pride,” Siegmund has often ridden an East German-produced Simson Schwalbe bicycle, including to the polls on Sunday in his hometown of Tangermunde, with his wife in tow. Siegmund has been dubbed the friendly face of the AfD, his campaign promises have been radical, including targeting undocumented migrants with a “remigration and deportation offensive” from day one. expatriates, while offering “baby bonuses” to families to reverse population decline in the small state of 2.1 million people. The German Economic Institute has warned that the AfD’s immigration policy would be “ruinous” for Saxony-Anhalt, which relies heavily on foreign-born workers, especially in the health sector. Others have expressed fears that an AfD-led state security apparatus could leak sensitive information to Russia, which Moscow could use to destabilize Germany. The Kremlin “Does not hide the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument to destabilize Germany for many years. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Thuringia state Interior Minister Georg Maier told the Handelsblatt newspaper.
