Leaders of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland have demanded that their party be included in coalition negotiations in two states where it won nearly a third of the vote in elections on Sunday, in results that have scrambled the political landscape a year before a general election.
Although the political earthquake from the elections in eastern Germany had been long foreseen, the centrist governing parties proved incapable of stopping the rise of the AfD, which came first in Thuringia state with nearly 33% of the vote and a close second in Saxony with almost 31%.
The three parties in the chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular government each scored in the single-digit percentage points in a stinging rebuke from voters, leaving another of the EU’s main powers, along with France, politically chastened and hamstrung.
Valérie Hayer, a French politician who leads the liberal Renew Europe grouping in the European parliament, called the state results “unprecedented” and said on X that “a dark day for Germany is a dark day for Europe”.
Wolfgang Kubicki, a deputy head of Germany’s co-ruling liberal Free Democrats and one of the German government’s fiercest internal critics, said Berlin had itself to blame for the rout. “People have the impression this coalition is hurting the country,” he said. “And it is certainly hurting the Free Democratic party.”
The AfD chapters in Saxony and Thuringia have been designated as “rightwing extremist” by the security authorities. Sunday’s result in Thuringia marked the first time since the Nazi period that a far-right party has claimed the top spot in a state election, raising questions about how long the democratic parties can keep it out of power by refusing any cooperation.
Scholz called the results “bitter” and “worrying”. He said: “Our country cannot and must not get used to this. The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.”
The night’s other big winner was the new leftwing-conservative populist party the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), named after its founder who broke off from the far-left Linke party last year, leaving it in tatters.
The BSW, which calls for higher taxes on top earners, curbs on immigration and an end to military assistance for Ukraine, scored nearly 16% in Thuringia and almost 12% in Saxony.
The election results underlined the festering cultural differences between east and west 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with many voters in the former communist region highly receptive to anti-western and pro-Russian appeals.
Given the fractured results handed back by voters, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which outperformed the remaining parties, will probably have to cobble together ideologically improbable coalitions spanning right to left in both states in order to govern.
Whether such governments can prove stable and capable of addressing the patently unsatisfied electorate’s main concerns will be a vexing question as the campaign for the national vote in September 2025 begins.
In Saxony, only an alliance of the CDU, which has governed the state since reunification in 1990, with the BSW and Scholz’s Social Democrats would have a ruling majority if the far right is excluded.
“It won’t be easy,” the state premier, Michael Kretschmer, of the CDU, said of the upcoming coalition talks. “But with a lot of discussions and the will to do something for this state, we can succeed in building a stable government with this election result in Saxony.”
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In Thuringia, a minority government of the same parties – CDU, BSW and Social Democrats – looks most likely, prompting howls of protest from the far right. “The voter wants the AfD taking part in the government,” the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel insisted.
The AfD’s top candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who has repeatedly used Nazi rhetoric at his rallies and called into question Germany’s atonement for the Holocaust, also cried foul. “If you want stability in Thuringia, you have to integrate the AfD,” he said. “Any constellation in which the AfD is not included won’t do this state any good.”
The AfD won a blocking minority in Thuringia, meaning it will be able to stand in the way of judicial appointments and amendments to the state constitution.
Meanwhile, analysts said the BSW now looked poised to clear the 5% hurdle in next year’s national election, potentially making it even harder for the traditional big-tent parties, the CDU and the SPD, to form a ruling coalition.
As his party will probably name the premier in both regions, the CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, emerged from the state polls strengthened in his bid to become the conservatives’ challenger to Scholz in the general election.
Merz has steadily moved his party to the right in the period since Angela Merkel, a moderate Christian Democrat, left office in 2021. He has seized on a mass stabbing in the western city of Solingen last month allegedly by a Syrian asylum seeker due for deportation to call for a tougher line on immigration.
On Tuesday he will meet representatives of the federal government and Germany’s 16 regional states for an “immigration summit”. Last week Scholz’s coalition announced plans to tighten knife laws and benefits for asylum seekers as well as more deportations in the wake of the Solingen attack.