Alternative für Deutschland won 43.8% of the vote in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt state election, nearly doubling its previous score and delivering the far-right party its strongest result in any German state. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-right CDU won 17.2%, while the centre-left SPD took 9.3%.
The AfD has 39 lawmakers in the 83-seat parliament, just short of an outright majority, so it is not yet clear whether the party can form a state government. The result has nevertheless intensified concern among Europe’s mainstream parties and encouraged nationalist movements elsewhere.
Why the result matters beyond Saxony-Anhalt
The AfD’s local branch is officially classified by Germany’s domestic intelligence service as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” organisation. Its state-election performance puts it closer to governing a German state than any far-right party has been since the second world war.
Nationalists described the result as a historic win and “just the beginning”, while mainstream leaders called it a grave moment for Europe. The timing has added weight to those reactions: Sweden votes in legislative elections next weekend, France faces a presidential ballot next spring, and parliamentary races are due later in France, Italy, Spain and Poland. Far-right parties are polling strongly in each of those countries, according to the analysis.
Why analysts caution against a continent-wide conclusion
Saxony-Anhalt has barely 1.8 million voters and has long been a far-right stronghold. The AfD’s support there has consistently been about twice its national average in federal and state elections over the past decade. Tarik Abou-Chadi, a professor of European politics at Oxford University, said the result should not be used to draw sweeping conclusions about the party’s electoral sociology. For additional context, see “Exit poll puts AfD ahead in key German state election”.
The AfD does lead national polls, but its broader position is uneven. It is ahead in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where state elections are due later this month, in a much tighter contest with the SPD, and it is second in Berlin. Far-right parties have also recently suffered defeats in the Netherlands and Hungary.
The wider debate over the far right’s rise
Research led by Matthijs Rooduijn of the University of Amsterdam found that more than 23% of voters in Europe backed a far-right party in their country’s most recent national election in 2026. The analysis, involving more than 150 political scientists in 31 countries, put the figure at about 10% a decade earlier and roughly 5% in 1995.
Political scientists disagree about whether mainstream parties’ refusal to work with the far right has helped its electoral growth. Some argue that exclusion shields the AfD from the compromises of government and leaves centrist coalitions unable to deliver. Other research, including a study of more than 1,300 governments in 57 countries, found that far-right parties entering government averaged a six-percentage-point increase at the next election.
Researchers also point to the normalisation of far-right themes, particularly immigration, by media and mainstream parties. Gabriela Greilinger, an Austrian-Hungarian political scientist, argued that far-right ideas have already entered political debate regardless of whether such parties hold office. A related part of this story is covered in “Why Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt election has minorities worried”.
What happens next
The immediate political question is whether the AfD can form a government in Saxony-Anhalt despite holding 39 of the parliament’s 83 seats. Attention will also turn to state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania later this month and to the upcoming votes in Sweden and France.
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