The AfD won Saxony-Anhalt with 43.8%, three seats short of a majority
Final turnout was 77.8%. The AfD took 39 of the Landtag's 83 seats, three fewer than it needs to govern alone. The CDU fell to 17.2% and Die Linke took 8.6%. The official result is not declared until 22 September.
The AfD recorded the best state result in its history on Sunday and still did not get there. Saxony-Anhalt’s returning officer put the party on 43.8% of the vote, which converts to 39 of the Landtag’s 83 seats. An absolute majority is 42.
Three short. Small enough to fit in a sentence, big enough to decide who runs the state for the next five years.
Turnout finished at 77.8%, and the morning had already flagged it: 34.72% of the electorate had voted by midday, against 22.4% at the same point in 2021. The CDU, which led the outgoing state government, fell to 17.2%. Die Linke took 8.6% and eight seats. Sunday’s count is provisional — the official second-vote result is not declared until 22 September.
Why three seats change everything
The AfD has never led a state government anywhere in Germany, and its lead candidate here was Ulrich Siegmund. Since 2023 the party’s state branch has been formally classified by Saxony-Anhalt’s constitutional protection office as confirmed right-wing extremist. Every other party with seats in the Landtag has so far kept up a public refusal to enter a coalition with it.
If that refusal holds, Sunday was both things at once: the party’s best ever result in the state, and not enough to hand it the government. With 39 seats the AfD has the largest bloc and the power to block. It does not have the votes to elect a premier.
The arithmetic that decides, here and in Lisbon
Forty-three point eight per cent is not a majority, and that is the only sentence worth keeping. In proportional systems, coming first and being able to add up are different questions, and it is the second one that forms governments.
It is the same arithmetic that means a censure motion in Portugal needs 116 votes to bring down a government: coming first and being able to add up are different things.
There is a wider reason to watch. A German state election does not change the federal government, but it changes the make-up of the Bundesrat, the chamber where the states vote on legislation that applies to the whole country. And what Saxony-Anhalt decided on Sunday will be read in Berlin as a rehearsal for what comes next.
Image: Gregor Rom / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
