AfD’s biggest electoral breakthrough yet
Germany’s political landscape shifted sharply on September 6 when the Alternative for Germany won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, taking 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats and finishing only three seats short of an outright majority. It was AfD’s strongest result in its 13-year history and more than doubled its 20.8% result from 2021. The CDU, which had led Saxony-Anhalt for 24 years, collapsed to 17.2%, while turnout reached 77%, an all-time high for the state.
AfD has moved from opposition to within touching distance of executive power. Germany’s mainstream parties still maintain their political firewall against governing with AfD, but the numbers now make that firewall much harder to maintain, and the party is actively courting conservative lawmakers as it searches for a path to government.
What AfD calls a governing program
The party did not adopt a campaign manifesto for Saxony-Anhalt. It adopted what it calls a Regierungsprogramm, a governing program, and the confidence in that name shows in the content. Its proposals include faster deportations, a state-level apparatus devoted to remigration, reduced dependence on migrant workers from backgrounds it describes as culturally alien, separate schooling for refugee children and incentives aimed at encouraging German citizens to have more children.
Eighteen of the document’s 156 pages deal specifically with immigration and remigration. The centerpiece is a deportation offensive backed by 100 million euros in dedicated funding, which would expand the state’s deportation-detention capacity roughly tenfold, from 30 facilities to at least 300, and add state-organized deportation flights. The proposals also include bringing expatriate German workers back and expanding voluntary-return programs, run through a dedicated Staff Office for Remigration.
Why Islam has become central
AfD’s politics do not stop at migration. Its national foundational program states that Islam does not belong to Germany, while saying integrated and law-abiding Muslims can belong to the country. The same program calls for restrictions on mosque construction by unconstitutional groups, foreign financing of mosques, state approval of imams and full-face veiling.
In Saxony-Anhalt, the party’s manifesto proposes using legal avenues to restrict Islamic expression, including the call to prayer and aspects of mosque appearance. For Muslim and migrant communities, some of whom have expressed fears about an AfD-led government, that makes the election existential, not abstract.
Jews then, Muslims now?
The comparison has limits. AfD is not the Nazi Party, and Muslim communities today face nothing equivalent to the systematic persecution and genocide imposed on Jews under Nazi rule.
But the historical question cannot simply be dismissed. AfD’s Thuringia leader Bjorn Hoecke has called Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial a monument of shame, arguing Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance has made ordinary national pride disreputable. Germany’s postwar political culture was built in large part around rejecting exclusionary nationalism and confronting the consequences of defining minorities as fundamentally outside the nation.
The relevant parallel is therefore not one of scale or predicted outcome. It is about the politics of belonging, exclusion and designated outsiders. AfD’s language around remigration, cultural incompatibility, national identity and Islam places those questions back near the center of German politics.
Germany’s firewall faces its hardest test
AfD still lacks enough seats to govern by itself, and the CDU, SPD, Greens and Left have all ruled out cooperation, together holding 39 seats to match AfD’s own total exactly. That leaves the balance of power with five lawmakers from the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, an anti-immigration Left splinter sitting in the state parliament for the first time. Its leader has already said it would be undemocratic to shut AfD out of government entirely, pointing to shared opposition to sanctions on Russia, which means the firewall’s fate may come down to a five-seat bloc almost nobody outside Germany has heard of.
The result is already affecting politics beyond Saxony-Anhalt. AfD advocates restoring closer economic and cultural ties with Moscow and ending German support for Ukraine, putting it sharply at odds with Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s foreign policy.
Reaction abroad has also revealed a divided international right. Matteo Salvini said the result showed that another Europe is possible, while Spain’s Santiago Abascal and Portugal’s Andre Ventura celebrated the result. France’s National Rally, however, maintained its distance from AfD, illustrating that Europe’s nationalist parties are far from a single unified bloc. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk issued one of the strongest condemnations of those celebrating AfD’s victory.
The clearest backing came from Washington. Vice President JD Vance has already told German lawmakers, at the Munich Security Conference, that there is no room for firewalls against AfD. Elon Musk congratulated the party directly, and Donald Trump posted the results without comment. The generational data points the same direction: in neighboring Thuringia and Saxony, close to a third of voters aged 18 to 29 have backed AfD in recent elections, a sign this is no longer a protest vote.
That leaves Germany facing a question much larger than who becomes Saxony-Anhalt’s next minister-president. When a far-right party once confined to the political margins wins nearly half the vote, the question is no longer whether it is rising. It is how far it can go.
By Shizza Umer
Sources
Associated Press: Saxony-Anhalt election result and aftermath
Associated Press: AfD wins 43.8% and 39 seats
Reuters: AfD courts conservative support after historic victory
Reuters: AfD and Saxony-Anhalt’s Russia divide
Correctiv: “Remigration” in the AfD Saxony-Anhalt governing program
AfD foundational programme
The Guardian: Minority fears ahead of the Saxony-Anhalt vote
Axios: BSW holds the balance of power in Saxony-Anhalt
CNN: Vance, Munich Security Conference remarks on Germany’s firewall
Euronews: International reaction to AfD victory
