by WorldTribune Staff, September 7, 2026 Non-AI Real World News
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has triggered a massive political earthquake after winning a historic landslide victory in elections in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
The AfD’s triumph marks the first time since World War II that a far-right party has won a state election in Germany. The win is seen as a direct threat to the European Union’s dominant consensus on open borders policies and its united anti-Russia stance.
Ulrich Siegmund celebrates the AfD’s historic victory in Saoxny-Anhalt. / Video Image
The AfD captured 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its share from previous elections.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) saw its support roughly cut in half, collapsing to just 17.2%.
The AfD won 39 out of 83 seats in the state parliament, putting it just three seats short of an absolute majority needed to govern alone.
“The reason Saxony-Anhalt matters,” foreign policy expert and author Daniel Schatz, who holds a doctorate in political science from Berlin’s Humboldt University, told Fox News Digital, “is that the AfD is no longer just knocking on the door of power. It may be close to kicking it open.”
Analysts are saying the AfD’s victory has sent shockwaves from Berlin to the Élysée Palace because Germany serves as the EU’s economic and political heavyweight. Mainstream European leaders view the result as a “grave moment” for European unity, while nationalist figures globally have cheered the outcome.
U.S. President Donald Trump reposted a screen shot of the election results.
Elon Musk wrote “well done” in German. He has previously argued that only the AfD could “save” Germany.
The AfD’s campaign, led in Saxony-Anhalt by 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, focused heavily on public anger surrounding immigration. The party has promised a sweeping “remigration and deportation offensive” and strict border controls.
“We’ve achieved exactly what we set out to do,” Siegmund told public broadcasting station ARD after the vote count at Magdeburg, where he could be headed as the state’s next governor. “We’ve made history in this state.”
As populists gain momentum across Europe, the EU’s open-border framework faces unprecedented internal resistance.
The AfD’s national leader, Alice Weidel, has vowed to close the borders, eliminate social benefits for migrants, and carry out Germany’s largest deportations.
Weidel’s position “could become a template for future successful elections throughout the continent. French voters will go to the polls for president next spring. A rightist, Marine Le Pen, leads the polls there by some 20 percentage points,” The New York Sun’s A.R. Hoffman noted.
An election is due in Spain by August, and in Italy by the end of next year. In the United Kingdom, the rise of Nigel Farage’s rightist Reform Party has been complicated by a series of scandals. A senior member of the AfD, Beatrix von Storch, told The New York Sun last year that she backs Mr. Farage and that she and Ms. Le Pen are “on the same team.”
Siegmund, thanked Musk “for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time.”
The AfD also advocates for an immediate end to military assistance to Ukraine and a revocation of refugee protections for Ukrainians. Under Mertz, Germany has been Europe’s largest single donor of aid to Ukraine.
The AfD backs ending sanctions against Moscow to restart deliveries of cheap Russian gas to aid deindustrialized German sectors. It also seeks to restore long-term diplomatic ties with Russia.
With two more regional elections scheduled this month, the pressure on Merz’s federal coalition in Berlin could destabilize national German politics ahead of the next major cycle, analysts say.
Merz has ruled out even passive cooperation with the AfD, but CDU lawmakers in Eastern Germany, where the far-right party is strongest, are divided about the firewall, setting the stage for a possible split in the party. Critics think ostracizing the AfD has alienated voters and forced the CDU to govern with parties that don’t support its agenda, leading to policy paralysis.
Merz, at a press conference on Monday, called himself “profoundly shocked” by the results and declared that “I promise the people in our country: our institutions are defensible and stable. We know that Germany, because of its history, bears a special responsibility. We will always hold up our constitutional order and our secure place in the heart of Europe.”
“The firewall is a signature policy of Friedrich Merz,” said Sudha David-Wilp, vice president and senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., a think tank. “It goes to the heart of what it means to be conservative in Germany, which is antithetical to a lot of what the AfD stands for, whether it’s their support for Russia or hostility to Europe.”
Other minor parties have led governing coalitions in German states, but no party outside the SPD or the CDU and the CSU has ever held a single-party governing majority in Germany since the Federal Republic was re-established in 1949.
Janek Treiber, a political science researcher at Dresden University of Technology, told Fox News Digital that if the AfD does win outright in Saxony-Anhalt, their policy influence would be limited due to the German federal system, but warned “you must not underestimate the political symbol this would give. That a single party, and a right-wing party, could rule a German state… The symbol that these parties, that have been ruling Germany since 1949 or the East since 1990, they now lose control. They now lose power. I think this is a much more important symbol than just saying, OK, (the) AfD will change this or that in its local school system or university system.”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency found last year that the AfD’s “ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order.”
The New York Sun’s Sharon Kehnemui noted that “Germany’s federal constitutional court could decide to deny the AfD rule by identifying it as unconstitutional based on Article 21, which has twice been invoked to ban parties that the court ruled subverted the democratic order.
“Born of anti-immigrant protests during the 2015 migration of one million Syrians to Germany, the AfD was denied authority to govern in the state of Thuringia in 2024, where a Christian Democratic governor took power with a minority government. AfD’s state chapters have been classified as terrorist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and racist by the country’s domestic intelligence agency.
“On the other hand, the party is gaining traction nationally, earning 21 percent of the vote in 2025’s federal election. Merz’s 28.5 percent in that election forced him to form a coalition with the Social Democrats. The next federal election is in 2029.”
