Germany’s Far-Right AfD Surges in Saxony-Anhalt Amid Rising Electoral Breakthrough

Voters like Mario Jung do not fit the traditional profile of a political hardliner. The 59-year-old banking clerk from Magdeburg in eastern Germany previously voted for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but he now blames former Chancellor Angela Merkel for pushing the party too far left. Ahead of the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, he plans to back the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. “I am a conservative, and the main reason for me to vote for the AfD is the economy,” he told Al Jazeera, while also supporting the party’s hardline stance on immigration, which includes deporting illegal, denied, and criminal immigrants.

These regional elections present a major challenge to Germany’s political establishment as the AfD contends for top government positions. In Saxony-Anhalt, the party is poised to become the first far-right force to head a German state government since World War II under the leadership of Ulrich Siegmund, whom the magazine Der Spiegel dubbed “Germany’s most dangerous man.” Formerly a member of the CDU and classified as a “far-right extremist” in Saxony-Anhalt by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, Siegmund and his party are leading the polls with over 40 percent of the projected vote.

The conservative CDU trails significantly at just over 20 percent, followed by the Left Party at 12 percent, the Social Democrats at 7 percent, and the Greens at 5 percent. While other parties could potentially form a governing majority without them, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) has explicitly ruled out cooperation with both the Left Party and the AfD, whose officials have utilized Nazi slogans.

Nationalism remains a central theme of the AfD platform. Titled “The Country First,” the election manifesto calls for abolishing the right to asylum, seizing cash and assets from asylum seekers, executing mass deportations, criminalizing insults to German identity, banning the “Antifa” movement, canceling public broadcasting, and reversing renewable energy shifts. Founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party following the European Union financial crisis, the AfD gained significant momentum during Angela Merkel’s 2015 refugee admissions and has since shifted further right, driven by nationalist and eastern hardline factions.

Experts attribute the AfD’s rise to a combination of structural factors in eastern states—such as job shortages, lack of local doctors, and depopulated villages—and widespread public dissatisfaction with the federal government and economic conditions. Thomas Biebricher, a professor at Goethe University Frankfurt, noted that the party successfully taps into neoliberal agendas and general discontent, warning that an AfD government would inflict considerable damage on Germany’s international image. Meanwhile, Martin Schroder, a professor of social sciences at Saarland University, highlighted that immigration concerns drive support for the AfD nearly ten times more than perceived economic disadvantages.

As additional key elections loom in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, where the AfD continues to poll strongly, the political landscape across Germany faces unprecedented transformation.