![\"FILE](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/https:\/\/media.zenfs.com\/en\/dpa_international_526\/417f31ab5144b6175b3fb420afa9444a.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nThe German electoral system is designed to create stable governments – and to keep minor parties, often at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, out of power.<\/p>\n
It’s a lesson drawn from the country’s dark 20th century history, when political fragmentation assisted the Nazis’ rise to power under the failed Weimar Republic.<\/p>\n
Hoping to create a more stable democracy, post-war West Germany developed a new electoral framework that consolidated the party system.<\/p>\n
In a 1953 speech, conservative lawmaker Gerhard Schr\u00f6der – later the West German foreign minister – said the new law’s purpose was to “counteract the fragmentation that threatens the survival and development of the parliamentary democratic system.”<\/p>\n
The system has survived largely intact to this day in the reunified country. Yet with a far-right party aiming to take power in a German state on Sunday for the first time since World War II, one part of the electoral law has suddenly become more important than ever.<\/p>\n
The 5% hurdle<\/p>\n
Elections at the national and state level in modern-day Germany require parties to secure 5% of the total vote, or win three constituencies outright, to gain a proportional share of seats in parliament.<\/p>\n
Falling short effectively wipes out a minor party’s voters from the equation, lowering the share needed by other parties to cobble together majorities and form workable governments.<\/p>\n
The current national coalition between Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), for example, holds a narrow majority of seats in the Bundestag – Germany’s lower house of parliament – despite earning a combined vote share of just under 45% in the 2025 election.<\/p>\n
This was largely due to the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) missing out on the 5% threshold by a whisker after earning 4.98% of the vote.<\/p>\n
But this time the tables are turned: Instead of easing the path to majorities for the traditional mainstream parties, the surging popularity of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, combined with the 5% hurdle, could bring a party on the far end of the political spectrum into power.<\/p>\n
Jumping the ‘firewall’<\/p>\n
Up until now, the AfD has never participated in a governing coalition in Germany’s 16 states or its federal government, as all other mainstream parties have refused to work with it, a stance famously known as the “firewall.”<\/p>\n
Saxony-Anhalt, however, could offer the AfD an opportunity to bypass the firewall entirely by securing an unprecedented absolute majority of seats in the state parliament in Magdeburg.<\/p>\n
The party is not expected to get 50% of the vote, but, assisted by the 5% clause, it might not have to.<\/p>\n
Recent polling suggests three parties – the BSW, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) – could fail to break the 5% mark in Saxony-Anhalt, with the SPD hovering just above the threshold.<\/p>\n
Should three of the four parties not make it, the AfD would likely be left requiring only around 43% of the vote to win a majority in Magdeburg and become the first far-right party to lead a state government in Germany since the Nazis.<\/p>\n
Such a scenario already exists: In the western state of Saarland, the SPD leads a single-party majority government after winning 43.5% of the vote in the 2022 election, with several parties having fallen short of the 5% threshold.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
FILE PHOTO – Vehicles displaying AFD flags are parked on a festival grounds in Quedlinburg. (is associated with: \u00abHow an electoral quirk could bring Germany’s far-right AfD to power\u00bb) Matthias Bein\/dpa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The German electoral system is designed to create stable governments – and to keep minor parties, often at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[452,36090,61661,76,5,42623,3849,3781,61662],"class_list":["post-85829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-afd","tag-bsw","tag-democrats","tag-german","tag-germany","tag-magdeburg","tag-saxony-anhalt","tag-spd","tag-west-german"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}