BERLIN — Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany, (AfD) has won the most votes in the closely watched regional election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt according to exit polls.
Read more German exit polls suggest far-right party has big lead in regional election
Projections show the party is comfortably ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), but it remains unclear whether the AfD will win enough seats to secure a majority in the state parliament.
According to exit polls released on Sunday by German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF the AfD is on course to win a record 44.1% to 44.5% of the vote. The Christian Democratic Union is projected to take 18.5%.
The AfD won 20.8% in the 2021 regional election. If the projections are accurate, the CDU has halved its share of voters while the AfD doubled theirs.
If the AfD succeeds in forming a government, it would mark the first time in Germany’s postwar history that the far-right has taken control of a state government.
The party’s anti-establishment appeal is no longer confined to eastern Germany; at the federal level, the party is also polling first. A win in Saxony-Anhalt would be a major breakthrough for a party that has been classified as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence authorities in several German states.
Speaking to public broadcaster ZDF, AfD federal leader Alice Weidel said Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives will never win another election.
“We are seeing explosive growth here,” she said, referring to Saxony-Anhalt. “We are going to see explosive growth across all of East Germany — and at the federal level, too.”
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The AfD candidate behind that growth in Saxony-Anhalt is 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, a former marketing man with a friendly image but a radical platform.
In his videos, he is dressed in a flawlessly ironed white polo shirt or starched white dress shirt — the uniform of Germany’s newly professionalized far-right.
His carefully coiffed side parting is as immaculate as his smile, something that distinguishes him from the rest of his party, whose members tend to grimace rather than grin.
But Siegmund’s broad smile rarely cracks, even when he speaks about the party’s biggest issue, immigration and the mass deportation of migrants. The incongruity is striking. The polished, affable politician is also a proponent of one of the hardest-right positions in contemporary European politics.
Siegmund has campaigned for mass deportations and changes to migration and education policy. The AfD has also called for changes to the region’s public broadcaster and closer relations with Russia and the MAGA movement in the United States.
After the result, Siegmund declared: “We have written history.”
He also thanked Chancellor Friedrich Merz, saying he had been “a very good campaigner for us.”
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