A German State Just Produced a 39-39 Tie With the Far Right
GLOBAL BACKDROP · POLITICS
Key Facts
—The result: The AfD took 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday 6 September, the largest share a far-right party has won in a German state election since 1945.
—The seats: It holds 39 of 83. The four parties that refuse to work with it also hold 39. A majority needs 42.
—The hinge: One small party, the BSW, has the remaining five seats and has not said what it will do.
—Not final: This is the preliminary official count. The state electoral committee certifies the result later this month.
—The collapse: The Christian Democrats fell to 17.2 percent from 37.1 percent, losing 25 of their 40 seats.
—What comes next: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin both vote on 20 September.
A German state has produced a parliament in which the far right and the parties that exclude it hold exactly the same number of seats. Latin America has spent twenty years learning what that kind of arithmetic does to a country.
Thirty-nine against thirty-nine
Saxony-Anhalt voted on Sunday 6 September. The AfD took 43.8 percent of the preliminary official count.
That is the largest share a far-right party has won in any German state election since 1945. Chatham House makes the same point in the same words.
The share converts to 39 of the state parliament’s 83 seats. In 2021 the party took 20.8 percent and 23 seats, in a chamber that then held 97.
The Christian Democrats fell to 17.2 percent from 37.1 percent. That cost them 25 of their 40 seats.
The party had governed Saxony-Anhalt since 2002, under Reiner Haseloff from 2011. Sven Schulze only took over as minister-president in January of this year.
The number that decides everything
Add the Christian Democrats’ 15 seats to the Social Democrats’ eight, the Greens’ eight and Die Linke’s eight. That is 39.
The AfD also has 39. Neither side can reach the 42 seats a majority needs.
Between them sits the Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht, a breakaway from Die Linke with 5.3 percent and five seats. The Free Democrats took 2.6 percent and lost every seat they had.
The BSW’s federal leadership has ruled out installing either the AfD’s Ulrich Siegmund or Schulze as minister-president. It has floated a candidate from outside the parties instead.
Its regional lead candidate, Thomas Schulze, has left the door open to working with the AfD bill by bill. “This tiny party could now play a decisive role in determining the future of Saxony-Anhalt,” the analyst Volker Resing told the Associated Press.
The wall was never a law
The Brandmauer, or firewall, is an understanding rather than a statute. Germany’s mainstream parties agreed not to govern with the far right or to accept its decisive votes.
An understanding lasts exactly as long as the people keeping it. This one has cracked before.
In February 2020 the Free Democrat Thomas Kemmerich became Thuringia’s premier on a ballot that passed only because all 22 AfD deputies backed him. Chancellor Angela Merkel called it unforgivable, and he announced his resignation the next day.
In 2023 the AfD’s Robert Sesselmann won the Sonneberg district administration, the first far-right politician to run a German county since the Nazi era.
The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation counted 121 cases of mainstream parties voting alongside the AfD in eastern councils between 2019 and 2023. Most concerned building, infrastructure and social policy rather than migration, which accounted for only eight.
The breach that reached Berlin
On 29 January 2025 the Bundestag passed a non-binding migration motion by 348 votes to 345. Friedrich Merz brought it as opposition leader; he is now chancellor.
It carried only because AfD votes supplied the margin. It was the first time a Bundestag majority had rested on the far right.
Between 160,000 and 250,000 people protested in Berlin within days, depending on whether the count comes from the police or the organisers.
Every previous breach was absorbed inside a week, a district or a single ballot. Saxony-Anhalt is different in scale, and scale is what containment was never built to survive.
Where the vote came from
The state’s economy supplies the mood. Population is down to 2.12 million since reunification, and unemployment runs at 8.2 percent against 6.5 percent nationally.
Company insolvencies rose about 18 percent in 2025, against 4 percent nationally on the same measure. The pressure sits in the Leuna and Bitterfeld chemical belt the state still treats as its identity.
Voters name migration rather than unemployment as the problem. Foreign nationals are 7.9 percent of the state population, against 14.9 percent nationally.
What changed was belief. Some 36 percent told pollsters in July they trusted the AfD most to fix the state, against 9 percent five years earlier.
Siegmund’s campaign converted that into an estimated 157,000 former non-voters and 83,000 former Christian Democrat voters. Turnout climbed to 77.8 percent from 60.3 percent.
Marcus Boick, a historian of Germany at Cambridge, argues that “voting for right-wing populists is a very rational thing to do in the rural areas” of the east.
Berlin braces, Warsaw fumes
Merz called Sunday’s result “the most serious election defeat that the CDU has had for years, for decades”. He said his party was “deeply shocked” and that “giving up is not an option for me”.
Schulze, the outgoing minister-president, chose defiance over concession. “Some say this is a dark day for Saxony-Anhalt. I say this is democracy.”
The result travelled. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk posted that “in Poland, only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany”, adding that “quite a few of them have gathered in Confederation and PiS”.
The reply was personal. The Confederation MP Konrad Berkowicz told Tusk it was his own camp that should worry about German money drying up, and the AfD member of the European Parliament Tomasz Froelich told the Polish prime minister to eat a Snickers.
The AfD’s roughly 576,000 second votes are about one percent of Germany’s national electorate. The party still leads the Social Democrats 35 to 32 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which votes on 20 September.
What this means from Latin America
Rio Times readers do not need a German dictionary to recognise this problem. They need only look at their own legislatures.
Peru has removed or forced out six presidents since 2018. The most recent was Jose Jeri in February 2026, four months after he replaced Dina Boluarte.
That happens inside a Congress split across a dozen shifting blocs. Each vote requires a new coalition, so nobody governs for a term.
Brazil’s answer has a name and a price. President Lula da Silva’s government depends on the Centrao, a bloc with no fixed ideology and a documented appetite for cabinet posts and budget earmarks in exchange for votes.
That is the kingmaker role the BSW has so far declined to play for free. Brazilian politics has priced it in for a generation.
Argentina ran the opposite experiment. Javier Milei took office in December 2023 with a small fraction of Congress and was not walled out but invited in, first through decree powers and then through seat-by-seat deals.
Latin America never wrote a doctrine as explicit as the Brandmauer. Exclusion here has always been improvised, coalition by coalition.
Saxony-Anhalt makes the same point from the other end. Even an explicit doctrine comes down to whichever five seats hold the balance.
More: World news in English, every day from The Rio Times.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the AfD win control of Saxony-Anhalt?
No. The preliminary official count gives it 39 of 83 seats, three short of a majority. The four parties that exclude it also hold 39, so the BSW’s five seats decide who can reach 42.
Is this the first time a far-right party has topped a German state election?
No. The AfD topped Thuringia in September 2024 with 32.8 percent. What is new in Saxony-Anhalt is the size of the share, 43.8 percent, the largest since 1945.
Is the result final?
Not yet. This is the preliminary official count. The state electoral committee meets later this month to certify the final result.
What is the Brandmauer?
It is an informal commitment by Germany’s mainstream parties never to govern with the AfD or accept its decisive votes. It has cracked before, in Thuringia in 2020, in Sonneberg in 2023 and in the Bundestag in January 2025.
Does this affect Chancellor Merz?
Not directly, because a state parliament has no say over Berlin. Indirectly it is real: Merz called it his party’s worst defeat in decades, and two more states vote on 20 September.
Connected Coverage
We covered the regional read-through in Global Economy Briefing — September 8, 2026 and the wider European policy picture in Europe Intelligence Brief.
Sources: Saxony-Anhalt state returning officer and election calendar; Federal Agency for Civic Education; Infratest dimap LanderTREND; Rosa Luxemburg Foundation study on the firewall; Destatis and Dun & Bradstreet on insolvencies; Bundesagentur fur Arbeit; Chatham House; Associated Press; NPR; Fortune; Christian Science Monitor; Notes from Poland.
This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error
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