A Far-Right Party Has Won Big in Germany – a First Since WW2

The far-right could take control of a German state for the first time since World War 2, after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday.

The party, which has threatened mass deportations and echoed Nazi propaganda, secured 43.8% of the vote, well ahead of the 17.2% won by the Christian Democratic Union, which is part of Germany’s ruling coalition.

But it is not yet certain that the AfD will be able to govern; it fell short of the absolute majority needed to run the state on its own, and some parties have ruled out going into any form of partnership.  

​The AfD, which is leading in national polls, first won a state election in 2024 in Thuringia, but it only secured a third of the vote, meaning opposition parties were able to govern by coalition.  

​Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt, has raised the prospect of a new election to secure an absolute majority,  but has also said he is willing to work with individual MPs or parties.

“If necessary there’ll just be new elections, then we’d just get 50 or 55%,” he told public-service broadcaster ZDF.

Saxony-Anhalt, in the country’s east, has a population of around 2.1 million.  

Based on preliminary results, the AfD will take 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, meaning it would need the support of at least three more MPs to govern.

The AfD has been accused of echoing Nazi propaganda on multiple occasions. In 2018 then-leader Alexander Gauland was accused by historians of paraphrasing one of Hitler’s speeches in an opinion piece for a rightwing newspaper.

The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, meanwhile, has attacked the Bauhaus school of design, calling it an “aberration of modernism”. The modern art school was forced to close in 1933 by the Nazis.  

​Isabella M Weber, author of Anti-Fascist Economics, blamed the AfD’s victory on Sunday on the failure of mainstream parties to build an economy for working people.

“Democratic parties have lost the working class,” she wrote on X. “In Saxony-Anhalt, a staggering 61% of workers voted for the rightwing extremist AfD. We need an anti-fascist economics to win workers back. And we need it now.”