A far-right party became the biggest force in a German state parliament for the first time since the second world war, exit polls showed on Sunday, while a new populist force on the left established a firm foothold in the country’s political landscape.
Voters in two closely watched elections in the former communist east made their dissatisfaction with Germany’s mainstream political parties clear, putting the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in the top spot in Thuringia, with between 30.5 and 33.5% of the vote, and second place in Saxony, with 30-31.5%, according to exit polls.
Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, said: “It is a historic success for us. It is the first time we have become the strongest force in a state election. It is a requiem for this coalition [in Berlin].”
The results in Saxony and Thuringia proved disastrous for the three ruling parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left-led federal government, with each scoring single-digit percentage shares of the vote in both states one year before Germany holds its next general election.
Although the outcome had been predicted for months, the centrist parties proved unable over the course of the year to reverse the trend and the results sent shock waves through the political landscape.
The leftwing but socially conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), named after its firebrand leader, found its calls for higher taxes on the rich, a tougher line on immigration and asylum, and an end to military support for Ukraine struck a deep chord in the east.
As no party won an absolute majority, the eight-month-old BSW could prove key in talks on forming a government in both states, as it scored between 11.5 and 12% and in Saxony and 14.5-16% in Thuringia, according to the exit polls.
The conservative opposition Christian Democratic Union party (CDU), which is leading in the national polls, won in Saxony as it did five years ago with about 32%, putting wind in the sails of its national leader, Friedrich Merz, who aims to challenge Scholz in the national election.
In Thuringia, it came in second behind the AfD, with about 24.5%, and could hammer out an ideologically awkward ruling alliance with smaller parties, including Wagenknecht’s.
Merz has said the CDU will never work with the extremists but has moved his party steadily rightward, particularly in its rhetoric on immigration, since Angela Merkel left power in 2021.
Many eastern voters say they are increasingly disillusioned with mainstream politics more than three decades after national reunification, with the lingering impact of structural decline, depopulation and lagging economic performance compounding a sense that they are still second-class citizens.
“The AfD has built up a core base [in the east] that now votes for it out of conviction, not just owing to frustration with the other parties,” said Prof André Brodocz, a political scientist at the University of Erfurt in Thuringia.
The anti-migration, anti-Islam AfD spent the last week of its campaign hammering home the message that the government is “failing” its citizens, while harnessing shock and outrage over the deadly mass stabbing in the western city of Solingen, allegedly by a Syrian rejected asylum seeker.
The party, whose Saxony and Thuringia chapters have been classed as rightwing extremist by security authorities, could still come in first in Brandenburg, the rural state surrounding Berlin which will vote on 22 September, polls suggest.
The 11-year-old AfD clinched its first mayoral and district government posts last year but has never joined a state government. The remaining, democratic parties have vowed to maintain a “firewall” of opposition to working with the AfD, keeping it out of power.
Its co-leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has repeatedly used banned Nazi slogans at his rallies and calls for an “about-face” in Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance and atonement.
His aim was to achieve a blocking minority of one-third of the votes in Thuringia, where the Nazis first won power in a German state government in 1930 before consolidating control in Berlin three years later. Final results due by early Monday will show if he was successful.
At a rally in Erfurt days before the election, Höcke told a cheering crowd that he and the AfD were the only ones standing in the way of the “cartel parties” working to “replace the German people” with a “multicultural society” under a “totalitarian dictatorship”.
Given the fractured results handed back by voters, coalition building in both states could prove tricky.
The BSW’s rise was described as a “gamechanger” by Brodocz, underlining the rejection of the established political parties while offering frustrated easterners an alternative to the AfD, which many see as too radical.
Wagenknecht, already gearing up for the 2025 federal elections, has suggested that she would drive up the price for joining any coalition, demanding “diplomacy” toward Russia while railing against a recent decision for the United States to begin deployment of long-range missiles in Germany from 2026.
Scholz’s coalition of the centre-left Social Democrats, the ecologist Greens and the liberal Free Democrats was already on the back foot and each of the parties had reason to dread Sunday’s election night results.
Riven by ideological differences and personal rivalries, the government has stumbled in recent months in realising its main policy initiatives, including kickstarting the moribund economy and getting more electric vehicles on German roads. The Greens’ co-leader, Omid Nouripour, recently described the coalition in Berlin as a “transitional government” in the period after Merkel’s 16 years in power.