The far-right Alternative for Germany won Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt by a wide margin, taking about 44.5 percent of the vote against 18.5 percent for the governing Christian Democrats, according to projections broadcast by public network ARD.
The result is more than double the party's 20.8 percent showing in the eastern state in 2021, when the CDU finished first with 37.1 percent. Bloomberg reported that the Left party stood at 9.5 percent, the Greens at 9 percent and the Social Democrats at 8 percent in the ARD figures.
It was not immediately clear whether the AfD had won enough seats to govern. The Associated Press reported that the outcome left open the question of whether Germany would get its first far-right state government since World War II, and Bloomberg reported that the party was expected to fall short of an outright majority. Every other party in the Landtag has maintained a policy of refusing to govern with the AfD.
"We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve," said Ulrich Siegmund, the party's lead candidate in the state, according to Al Jazeera.
NPR reported that projections by ARD and ZDF put the party in a range of 44.1 to 44.5 percent, comfortably ahead of Merz's CDU. Final counts were still pending Sunday night.
Siegmund, a former entrepreneur with a large social media following, has campaigned on turning Saxony-Anhalt into a launching pad for a national AfD victory in 2029. France 24 reported that he rode a Simson moped, an East German brand that carries a certain nostalgia in the region, to cast his ballot in his hometown of Tangermuende. His party has leaned hard on that nostalgia and on resentment over the wealth gap between east and west that persists nearly four decades after the Berlin Wall fell.
The Landtag in Magdeburg has a minimum of 83 seats, with 42 needed for a majority, though overhang and leveling seats can enlarge it. Several smaller parties were hovering near the 5 percent threshold, and how many of them clear it will determine how far the AfD's vote share converts into seats.
Two more state elections, in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, follow later this month. Saxony-Anhalt, a state of about 2.1 million people west of Berlin, has been governed since 2021 by a CDU-led coalition with the Social Democrats and the Free Democrats.