For the first time since the Second World War, a right-wing extremist party will win a state election in Germany.
According to post-election polls, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), founded in 2013 with an anti-immigration and eurosceptic platform, won the most votes in the eastern German state of Thuringia.
The party is expected to win 33.5% of the vote (23.4% in the 2019 election), followed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with 24.5%.
For the first time since the Second World War, a right-wing extremist party will win the most seats in a German state parliament.
However, it was almost certain that the AfD would be ousted from power by its rivals.
The AfD also performed well in neighbouring Saxony, where it trailed the CDU by just half a percentage point, according to a ZDF poll.
The CDU, which has governed Saxony since German unification more than 30 years ago, is the largest opposition party at federal level and appears to have won 32% of the vote in the state.
The AfD was close behind with 31.5% as of Sunday, according to the poll.
There were around 3.3 million voters in Saxony and 1.7 million in Thuringia.
The left-wing populist coalition Sara Wagenknecht (BSW), which like the AfD calls for stricter control of migration and wants to end the rearmament of Ukraine, came in third in both federal states, with up to 16% of the vote. In Thuringia he received 12% of the vote and in Saxony he received 12%.
Setback for German Chancellor’s coalition
Just a year before the September 2025 federal elections, the success of right-wing extremists is a blow to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition.
Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) currently govern at the federal level with the Greens and FDP. These parties expected only a weak result on Sunday.
The AfD does not have the majority it needs and will probably not be able to form a state government because other parties also refuse to cooperate with it.
The AfD is strongest in the former communist east, and domestic intelligence officially monitors its branches in Saxony and Thuringia as “proven right-wing extremist” groups.
Immigration has risen to the top of Germany’s political agenda after a knife attack by a suspected Islamic extremist left three people dead at a festival in the western German city of Solingen on August 23.
“Our freedoms are becoming more and more restricted because people who don’t fit in the country are allowed into the country,” Thuringia’s AfD leader Björn Höcke said Thursday at a campaign event in Nordhausen. A polarizing figure, the history teacher has called the Berlin memorial to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews a “shameful monument.”
He was convicted earlier this year of using Nazi slogans at a party rally.
