MAGDEBURG — The Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8 percent of the vote in Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt, nearly doubling its previous result and marking the party's strongest regional performance to date.
The victory positions the AfD closer to governing a German state than any far-right party has come since World War II. The party secured 39 seats in the 83-member state parliament, falling short of an outright majority.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Christian Democratic Union saw support collapse to 17.2 percent, less than half its share in the same election five years ago. The center-left Social Democratic Party received 9.3 percent.
Germany's domestic intelligence service classifies the AfD's Saxony-Anhalt branch as "confirmed rightwing extremist." The party has faced scrutiny for Nazi imagery and distinguishes between "biological" and "passport" Germans. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has said the AfD is too extreme.
Whether the AfD will form a government remains unclear. State negotiators must resolve coalition arithmetic in coming weeks.
Saxony-Anhalt, with 1.8 million voters, has historically tilted far-right. Support for the AfD there has consistently run double the national average over the past decade.
Tarik Abou-Chadi, a professor of European politics at Oxford University, cautioned against reading too much into a single state result. "A far-right party winning a regional election in Germany is no more alarming than a similar victory in France, the United Kingdom, or the Netherlands," he said.
Yet the AfD leads in national German polls and shows strong performance in other states, heading into elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania later this month. The party ranks second in Berlin.
Across Europe, nearly one in four voters now back far-right parties, according to research by Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam. That represents a fivefold increase since the mid-1990s. Far-right movements are polling strongly ahead of legislative elections in Sweden next weekend, a presidential ballot in France next spring, and parliamentary races later this year in Italy, Spain, and Poland.
