The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won the election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to exit polls.<\/p>\n
AfD won 44.2 percent of the vote, exit polls for the ARD broadcaster suggested on Sunday. That is more than twice the 17.4 percent for the incumbent centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,\u201d said AfD\u2019s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund. \u201cWe have made history in this state.\u201d<\/p>\n
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel also hailed the \u201chistoric\u201d result, which has given the far-right party a \u200cclear mandate to govern, though it was not immediately clear whether it would be able to form a government.<\/p>\n
Merz did not make a statement on Sunday evening on the election results. The German leader left the CDU\u2019s head office, the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, after 10pm local time (20:00 GMT).\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe reality is the AfD has got the lion\u2019s share of the votes in this election, according to the exit polls. But the question is: is it enough to get them control of the state? Right now, we cannot say for sure,\u201d reported Al Jazeera\u2019s Dominic Kane from Magdeburg in eastern Germany.<\/p>\n The latest projections gave the AfD 39 of the state parliament\u2019s 83 seats, leaving it three short of the 42 needed for an absolute majority in the state parliament in Magdeburg.<\/p>\n Siegmund said he wanted to extend a hand to all parties willing to bring about a fundamental political transformation in the state. However, the AfD will not bend to other parties\u2019 will, he stressed.<\/p>\n The AfD has never participated in a governing coalition in Germany\u2019s 16 states, nor in its federal government, as all other mainstream parties refuse to work with it, a policy infamously known as the \u201cfirewall\u201d.<\/p>\n Tino Chrupalla, the AfD\u2019s national co-leader, claimed the result showed that voters had rejected the governing coalition\u2019s policy.<\/p>\n The mainstream parties \u201cwere voted out, or rather, the voters delivered a clear verdict, and I can only encourage them to recognise that the \u2018firewall\u2019 has been definitively rejected by the voters today,\u201d Chrupalla told broadcaster ARD.<\/p>\n Saxony-Anhalt\u2019s AfD branch has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the state\u2019s domestic intelligence agency, a designation the party rejects as politically motivated.<\/p>\n Blow to Merz\u2019s authority<\/p>\n Sunday\u2019s result is another blow to the authority of Merz, whose popularity has declined as \u200chis coalition government struggles to revive growth in Europe\u2019s largest economy.<\/p>\n His centre-right CDU came a distant second. Incumbent Saxony-Anhalt state premier Sven Schulze congratulated the AfD and acknowledged that the result had hit his party hard, saying, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to live with this result\u201d.<\/p>\n Schulze later said he did not intend to cooperate with the AfD, although he initially declined to give a clear answer when asked whether the CDU\u2019s firewall would remain in place.<\/p>\n The projected parliamentary arithmetic would make forming a government exceptionally difficult. Schulze could attempt to assemble an alliance involving several parties, though the CDU has traditionally ruled out formal cooperation with both the AfD and the Left (Die Linke) party.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n AfD has tapped into a sense of nostalgia for communist East Germany, as well as lingering resentment about the enduring wealth gap with the west decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.<\/p>\n In line with the sometimes defiant sense of local \u201cOssie pride\u201d, Siegmund has often ridden an East German-produced Simson Schwalbe bike, including to the polling booth on Sunday in his hometown of Tangermunde,\u00a0with his wife in tow.<\/p>\n While Siegmund has been dubbed the friendly face of the AfD, his campaign promises have been radical, including targeting undocumented migrants with a \u201cremigration and deportation offensive\u201d from day one.<\/p>\n AfD\u2019s agenda<\/p>\n The party\u2019s anti-\u201cwoke\u201d agenda also includes promises to replace LGBTQ pride rainbow flags at public schools with the German standard and to change history teaching to lessen the emphasis on Hitler\u2019s Third Reich.<\/p>\n To replace migrant workers, the AfD wants to lure back German expatriates, while offering \u201cbaby bonuses\u201d for families to reverse the shrinking population in the small state of 2.1 million.<\/p>\n The German Economic Institute has warned that the AfD\u2019s immigration policy would be \u201cruinous\u201d for Saxony-Anhalt, which is highly reliant on foreign-born workers, especially in the health sector.<\/p>\n Others have voiced fears that an AfD-run state security apparatus could leak sensitive information to Russia, which Moscow could use to destabilise Germany.<\/p>\n The Kremlin \u201cmakes no secret of the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument for destabilising Germany for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,\u201d Thuringia state Interior Minister Georg Maier told the Handelsblatt daily newspaper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has won the election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1047989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[90,440,117,50,55040,103],"class_list":["post-1047988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-elections","tag-europe","tag-germany","tag-news","tag-the-far-right","tag-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117227339457196456","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1047988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1047989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1047988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1047988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1047988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}