Alice Weidel has a new number to obsess over. On September 7, the co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s far-right party, declared that its next target was 40 per cent of the vote at the country’s next federal election, expected by 2029. The ambition might once have sounded fantastical. However, after the party’s performance in Saxony-Anhalt, it doesn’t sound improbable. The AfD won 43.8 per cent in the eastern state on September 6th, more than twice the 17.2 per cent secured by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It was the strongest result ever achieved by the AfD in a German state election and brought it within touching distance of governing a state for the first time in the Federal Republic’s post-war history.
For Ms Weidel, this was a “dream result.” For Mr Merz, it was a political earthquake. The chancellor said that the result had left his party “deeply shocked” and warned that the CDU could not simply return to “business as usual.” That is an understatement. The CDU’s result was its worst in Saxony-Anhalt since German reunification in 1990. The AfD, meanwhile, won 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats, just three short of the 42 required for an outright majority. Turnout was unusually high, at 77.8 per cent, suggesting that the result was not simply the product of a disengaged electorate.
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