This Could Be the Year Germany's Far-Right Goes Mainstream
One forgotten region is about to make history.
In the middle of Germany lies a state that many people outside the country have never heard of: Saxony-Anhalt. Picture a conservative and underappreciated region marked by industrial decline and rural traditionalism. There is rich regional history here. Notable figures such as Martin Luther, Otto von Bismarck, and Friedrich Nietzsche were born within its territory, but in its present form, the state has existed only since German reunification in 1990. It doesn’t evoke strong associations like Bavaria, and it doesn’t often make international headlines.
Yet at the moment, journalists from all over the world are descending on Saxony-Anhalt. They feel history could be made here, in this sparsely populated place of 2.2 million souls. When people go to the polls on September 6 to elect a new state parliament, the outcome could reverberate far beyond Germany’s borders.
If polling holds, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) will comfortably win the Saxony-Anhalt election with around 40% of the vote. Domestic intelligence has classified the state branch of the party as “right-wing extremist,” yet this hasn’t put off voters. In fact, the current polling trajectory puts it within reach of winning an absolute majority of seats in the state parliament, which would allow the AfD to govern Saxony-Anhalt alone without coalition partners and elect the minister president—Germany’s equivalent of a governor.
Saxony-Anhalt could thus become the first part of Germany run by a far-right party since the end of the Second World War. The AfD itself is very conscious of this as a historical moment. Its leader in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, a charismatic and well-groomed young man who appears to be smiling non-stop on the campaign trail, says he intends to “write history.” He emphasizes at every opportunity that his manifesto for Saxony-Anhalt is intended to be a blueprint for other parts of the country.
So what would an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt actually do? Much like the United States, Germany has a federal system. Power is divided between the national government and sixteen state governments. While Berlin handles matters such as foreign policy and defense, the German states have substantial responsibility for areas such as education, policing, and culture. And that’s where the AfD manifesto is notably different from the other parties.
In the section on schooling, for instance, the manifesto bemoans that “having the correct opinion is now valued above real knowledge.” It argues for a return to “traditional education” in the form of “homework, teacher-led instruction, regular in-class exercises, systematic review and assessment, extensive reading.” In addition, the AfD argues that disabled children and children who came to Germany as asylum seekers should be taught in separate classes or even separate schools.
The program also wants to ban the rainbow LGBTQ flag from schools, and argues that “children [should] be taught as a role model the normal family consisting of a man and a woman, from which children are born.” This is something it also picks up in its explicitly pro-natal family policy, blaming declining birth rates on the fact that “sexual deviations and non-reproductive lifestyles now enjoy greater acceptance and are promoted more aggressively than the normal family.”
On culture, meanwhile, what the AfD is proposing in Saxony-Anhalt is a radical break from Germany’s “memory politics” (or Erinnerungskultur). The post-war approach in both East and West Germany put education about the Nazi era front and center under the slogan “never again.” When I grew up in Germany in the 1990s, we learnt three times about Hitler’s rise and reign in school, which meant we ran out of time to deal with anything after 1945. The AfD says it wants to change this, shifting the emphasis to the 19th century, when Germany first became a nation state, as an era that “can still be a source of inspiration and a role model for us today.” This would involve “rewriting the history curriculum,” “honoring the sacrifice of soldiers” in both World Wars, defunding “anti-German art and culture,” and changing the state motto of Saxony-Anhalt from “Think Modern” to “Think German.”
Finally, while immigration is the AfD’s core issue, the party has limited room to maneuver at the state level, as immigration policy is largely the federal government’s prerogative. But the party says it would use Saxony-Anhalt’s four votes in Germany’s upper chamber to lobby for radical change at the national level, while simultaneously enacting state-level measures like refusing to take an allocated share of asylum seekers if they have entered Germany through a safe state. There is also a notable and frequent use of the term “remigration” to describe the party’s mass deportation plans. Because the term in its current political sense was coined by far-right circles, the federal AfD leadership tried to distance itself from it for a while before readopting it last year. There’s no sense of hesitation about it in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party demands a “180-degree turn on migration.”
The AfD’s plan for Saxony-Anhalt reads like an ambition for all of Germany, and we should take that ambition very seriously. For years this wasn’t done, because an AfD government seemed unlikely. Not least due to its Nazi past, Germany has a cross-party consensus to uphold a firewall (or “Brandmauer”) against parties to the right of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). This means no party will form a coalition with the AfD. Even when the AfD came first in the 2024 elections in Thuringia, a state neighboring Saxony-Anhalt, the center-right CDU, which came second, chose to form an unpopular minority government with parties to its left, sending the AfD into opposition despite being the largest party.
So what’s different in Saxony-Anhalt? For one thing, the AfD is very close to an absolute majority here. Where in Thuringia it won with 33% in 2024, the latest polls for Saxony-Anhalt give it 41%—a result that would double the party’s vote share compared to the last election in 2021. Of course, this is nowhere near 50%, but the party might still get more than half the seats if smaller parties like the Greens don’t meet the 5% hurdle to enter the state parliament, and those seats get distributed among the parties that do.
Then there’s the fact that the firewall looks shaky. According to one recent poll, the AfD could end up just two seats short of a majority. Those seats could be supplied by rogue conservatives from the CDU. Officially, this isn’t on the cards, but there would be very little to stop individual parliamentarians from voting with the AfD or even changing parties once elected. The nervousness in the CDU about this is palpable. One of its most senior figures recently threatened that he would “intervene” should the Saxony-Anhalt chapter of his party begin talks with the AfD. Meanwhile, the populist-left BSW party, a relative newcomer, has indicated that they’d be willing to work with the AfD.
So there are many viable routes for the AfD to achieve power in Saxony-Anhalt. But parts of the German media still treat the erosion of the old political landscape as a regional—and therefore containable—development. One argument is that Saxony-Anhalt, like Thuringia, is in the former East Germany. The AfD have long polled more strongly here than in the former West Germany. Some commentators have put this down to the idea that East Germans feel uniquely “estranged from democracy” due to having lived in a socialist dictatorship for four decades after the Second World War.
But such explanations are not only dismissive of swaths of voters—they are also misleading. For one, the AfD now also leads in the national polls. At around 28%, it may be far from an outright majority in future federal elections, but it’s worth remembering that those are figures that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. In 2021, when the AfD reached just 10% in the federal German elections, commentators looked aghast at Saxony-Anhalt, where it was polling in the twenties.
The Saxony-Anhalt election, then, is one to watch—and not as a regional anomaly, but as a landmark indicator of a shift to the right affecting all of Germany.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and author.
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