Alternative für Deutschland wins Saxony-Anhalt election, party falls short of majority and faces coalition blockade, Musk and foreign leaders weigh in as Berlin’s firewall holds

Images

The AfD’s candidate for governor, Ulrich Siegmund, said that ‘we have written history’ and the party has a clear mandate to govern. Photograph: Matthias Schräder/AP theguardian.com

Siegmund celebrating with the AfD’s co-leaders Alice Weidel (left) and Tino Chrupalla (right) after polls closed on Sunday. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters theguardian.com

Lead Saxony Anhalt candidate Ulrich Siegmund, right, speaks beside party co-founder Alice Weidel at an election party on Sunday. Siegmund says he wants to build a stronger relationship with Elon Musk. Photograph: Matthias Schräder/AP theguardian.com

Alternative für Deutschland wins Saxony-Anhalt election, party falls three seats short of a majority and demands a mandate to govern, the firewall leaves the winner without partners

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, taking 39 seats in the 83-member parliament—three short of an outright majority—according to The Guardian’s reporting from Berlin. The party’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund declared that the AfD had “written history” and said voters had signalled that “things cannot carry on like this”, while mainstream parties reiterated they would not work with the AfD.

The result sharpens a pattern that has been building across German politics: a party can top the poll and still be structurally blocked from governing. The AfD’s strategy in Saxony-Anhalt was to win an absolute majority precisely to break the refusal of other parties to cooperate; falling short forces the contest back into coalition arithmetic. The Christian Democrats (CDU) finished far behind on 17.2% and 15 seats, with the Social Democrats, Greens and Left clustered on single-digit shares and eight seats each, leaving no obvious governing bloc that reflects the election’s headline outcome.

Siegmund framed migration and domestic security as issues “not up for debate”, and he used the campaign to argue that the established parties had failed over decades. The same election that delivered the AfD 43.8%—more than double its share from five years ago—also produced record turnout of 76.5%, suggesting that mobilisation is rising on both sides of the divide rather than stabilising around a new consensus.

External attention arrived quickly. A second Guardian report said Siegmund publicly thanked Elon Musk on X for his support, after Musk posted “Well done!” in German to AfD co-leader Alice Weidel; US President Donald Trump reposted a screenshot of the projection on Truth Social without comment. Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev praised the win as “historic” and “pragmatic”, as European officials reacted in the opposite direction: France’s Europe minister Benjamin Haddad called it “a serious moment in Europe”, and Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said only “idiots or traitors” could rejoice.

Inside Germany, the institutional counterweight is already formalised. The domestic intelligence agency classifies the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as “rightwing extremist”, a label that sits uneasily alongside a near-majority vote share and complicates how other parties justify continued non-cooperation. The German Economic Institute warned that the AfD’s immigration policy would be “calamitous” for the state’s economy, noting Saxony-Anhalt’s aging, dwindling population and reliance on foreign workers—an argument that turns labour needs into a constraint on what elected officials can promise.

For now the AfD has the largest bloc and no route to power, while the parties that lost the election are left to assemble a government from the remaining seats. Saxony-Anhalt’s parliament will still have 83 chairs, but the biggest group will sit three seats away from being able to use them.