AfD Wins Key German Regional Election, Exit Polls Show

MAGDEBURG, Germany—The Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 44.5 percent of the vote in the Sept. 6 state election in Saxony-Anhalt, emerging as the winner of Sunday’s election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to exit polls.

Siegmund ran on a platform that promises a “deportation and remigration offensive,” a state baby bonus, cuts to public broadcasting, deregulation and tax cuts, a reduction in the number of state ministries, and the creation of a parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

Exit polls indicate that at least four other parties are set to enter the state parliament alongside the AfD: CDU, the far-left Die Linke, the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD), and the Greens.

A ‘Firewall’ Under Strain

The vote is the sharpest test yet of a so-called firewall; that Germany’s established parties refuse to govern with the AfD.

In September 2024 the party came first in neighboring Thuringia with 32.8 percent and was kept out of office by a three-party minority government; it finished a close second in Saxony and Brandenburg.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD has sat in opposition since it entered the legislature in 2016 with 24.3 percent. It slipped to 20.8 percent in 2021, when Reiner Haseloff’s CDU won a clear victory and formed a coalition with the SPD and FDP; the surge came afterward, with 37.1 percent of the state’s vote in the February 2025 federal election, in which the AfD finished first in every eastern state outside Berlin, and 40 to 43 percent in the final pre-election polls.

The party’s rise has coincided with escalating official scrutiny. The state’s domestic intelligence office has classified the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization since October 2023 and says its membership grew by more than a third last year, to 3,500. The federal agency applied the same label to the whole party in May 2025, a decision the AfD is contesting in court.

The federal decision also drew sharp criticism from Washington. “Germany just gave its spy agency new powers to surveil the opposition. That’s not democracy: it’s tyranny in disguise,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X in May 2025.

The label has done little to dent the party’s standing in the polls. Nationally, the AfD leads: the August ARD DeutschlandTrend survey by Infratest dimap put it at a record 28 percent, seven points ahead of Merz’s Union, with 85 percent of Germans rating the federal government negatively and 14 percent satisfied with the chancellor.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel told ZDF broadcasting company in August that the party would govern in the states and eventually in Berlin. The next tests come on Sept. 20, when Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the AfD leads at about 37 percent, and Berlin elect new parliaments.

What Drives the Vote?

Migration and public security are the AfD’s signature issues, and in Saxony-Anhalt they are tied to a specific event: On Dec. 20, 2024, a Saudi doctor granted asylum in Germany in 2016 drove a rental car into Magdeburg’s Christmas market, killing six people and injuring more than 300. He was sentenced to life in prison in June.

The numbers show how the issue has moved. Political research institute Infratest dimap’s July survey for the public broadcaster MDR ranked immigration as the state’s most important problem, ahead of education and the economy, and found that 36 percent of voters trusted the AfD most to handle the state’s key tasks, against 16 percent for the CDU; five years earlier the figures were 9 percent and 40 percent.

The state’s foreign population reached a record 192,155 at the end of 2025, more than double the 83,051 of 2015, with the largest increases coming from Ukraine and Syria.

The economy competes for first place. The ZDF Politbarometer a week before the vote put the economy (22 percent), unemployment (17 percent) and schools (17 percent) at the top of voters’ concerns; unemployment stood at 8.1 percent in July, according to the Federal Employment Agency.