After landslide far-right victory, Germany asks: What just happened?
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| Matthias Schrader/AP Ulrich Siegmund from the Alternative for Germany and party leaders Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel speak to party members in front of a sign reading "it starts here," at an election party after the Saxony-Anhalt state election in Magdeburg, eastern Germany, Sept. 6, 2026. Loading...
Sept. 08, 2026, 11:03 a.m. ET | Magdeburg, Germany
Germany is taking stock of a dramatically changed political world in the aftermath of a stunning election.
“For many, all that remains is disbelief,” reports Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It is an unimaginable moment,” adds the Frankfurter Allgemeine. The country’s leader, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has said the result has shaken his party “to its very foundations.”
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt in a landslide. By taking 43.8% of the vote, the AfD could be the first far-right party to lead a state government since World War II. It is only three seats short of a ruling majority. Negotiations as to who will lead the state are ongoing.
The success of the far-right Alternative for Germany in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt has led to disbelief in a country that has tried to avoid any repetition of its extremist past. Germans are now asking whether the party is a threat to democracy or if, after its electoral success, other parties should work with it.
Two-thirds of Germans say they are concerned about the results, according to a poll by German broadcaster ARD.
Yet this is hardly a result no one saw coming. If anything, recent years have built to this moment with a sense of inevitability. The AfD has been rising, and the German establishment has failed to stop its momentum. Nationally, Politico shows the AfD as the leading party with 28% support.
So Germany is left with questions, many of which feel existential.
Is the AfD a threat to democracy, as the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution suggests, labeling it extremist? What should the German establishment do now? And how did the AfD get so popular?
Before Sunday, these answers seemed simpler, or at least more distant. Now, for perhaps the first time, Germany is being forced to reconsider all the political assumptions on which its resistance to the AfD has been built.
The new poll already suggests a shift. Despite their concern, 51% of Germans say other parties should work more closely with the AfD. Until now, all other parties have refused to collaborate with the AfD as part of a political “firewall.”
For many Germans, that brings echoes of the Weimar government that allowed the Nazis into power in 1933. But how does a democracy exclude a party that wins 43% of the vote – 26 percentage points more than the second-place party?
The way forward is not clear, many agree. But the AfD’s final rally last week before the election in the state capital of Magdeburg offered clues as to why one East German state has essentially mounted a revolt.
The AfD’s “Family Fest” could be mistaken for a county fair. There are bouncy castles and ice cream stands. On stage, a musical act sings Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69” in a passable American accent. The smell of grilling sausage is snatched away on the breezes of a blustery, late-summer day.
But there is no doubt of the main attraction. A line more than one hundred people long unspools out of a tent beside the stage. Here stands Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate for state premier, and one fact immediately becomes blindingly obvious.
Annegret Hilse/Reuters Ulrich Siegmund of the far-right Alternative for Germany hugs a woman outside a polling station as he arrived to vote in the Saxony-Anhalt state election, in Tangermuende, Germany, Sept. 6, 2026. This is not your typical German politician.
“Look at our chancellors,” says Markus Ziener, an analyst for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “They are all rather boring.”
Mr. Siegmund is anything but. He is dashing, with his Nordic-cut stubbled chin and perfectly gelled silver hair. Yet more than that, he gives the appearance of genuinely caring. As the line lengthens, he shows no sign of fatigue. Each visitor gets a handshake or a hug.
During the campaign, he once delivered his message from among a fleet of Simson mopeds, a classic East German brand that evokes plentiful nostalgia. He chronicled behind-the-scenes moments for his TikTok feed, never a hair or a smile out of place.
At a time when Chancellor Merz, a former investment banker with the lowest approval ratings of any chancellor in postwar history (13%), is talking about how to get out of a “climate of gloom and resentment,” Mr. Siegmund is a jolt of political energy.
Mr. Siegmund’s top rival in the election, the state leader of Mr. Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, played by the German playbook, “giving lectures and being very presidential in a way, but this is not working,” says Mr. Ziener.
The CDU finished with 17.2% of the vote, its worst-ever result in the state.
Mr. Siegmund’s approach “is new in the sense that he’s deliberately trying to be approachable, close to the people,” says Mr. Ziener. “All of a sudden the lady who is the cashier at the supermarket feels heard.”
The AfD began from the ideas of academics pushed to the fringes for their insistence that Germany should stop obsessing about the Holocaust – that it was “a speck of bird poop” in Germany’s long, proud history, as one party leader said.
Mr. Siegmund, a former salesman, is a warning shot to the establishment, not only for his party affiliation, but for the entire idea of what campaigning is. The AfD now knows that.
“This is what the party is thinking, he is a possible role model for the party,” says Ronald Gläser, an AfD member of the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, from Berlin.
As Mr. Siegmund continues to shake hands and sign T-shirts in Magdeburg, other AfD leaders take the stage. None mince words. Germany is failing because it is being overrun by migrants, one…
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