Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has come first in a state election for only the second time in its 13-year history.

In Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, the party took 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its 2021 result of 20.8% and finishing almost 27 points clear of second place. It is the strongest result any party has posted in the state since German reunification in 1989.

It is not, yet, a government. The AfD’s vote share gives it 39 of 83 seats in the state’s Parliament, three short of the 42 needed to govern alone. Everyone else lost ground to get it there. The governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU), under Minister-President Sven Schulze, collapsed to 17.2% (15 seats), roughly half its previous support and the worst result for a sitting German state government in decades. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) took 9.3% (eight seats), the Greens 8.9% (eight seats), Die Linke 8.6% (eight seats), and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, known as BSW, entered the state Parliament for the first time on 5.3% (five seats). The pro-business Free Democratic Party was wiped out, falling from seven seats to zero. Turnout was 76%, up sharply from 60% in 2021.

The chart below shows the vote share for the various parties in the 2021 and 2026 state elections.

The chart below shows the seat share in the state legislature after yesterday’s election.

The arithmetic against the AfD exists on paper. CDU, SPD, Greens, Linke, and BSW together hold 44 seats to the AfD’s 39. But CDUs’ federal leadership under Chancellor Friedrich Merz has explicitly ruled out any coalition involving Die Linke, the post-communist left-wing party. Strip Linke out and the remaining “firewall” parties, CDU, SPD, Greens, and BSW, hold only 36 seats. There is no anti-AfD majority available to Merz’s party without doing the one thing it has said it will not do.

The options left on the table for the CDU are a minority CDU government surviving on ad hoc votes, an informal “confidence and supply” arrangement modelled on neighbouring Thuringia, or new elections. None of them is ideal for the CDU, and all of them leave the AfD as the dominant force in the state’s politics regardless of who holds the premier’s office.

Analysts also say that BSW could help the AfD form a government, while some defections from the CDU, to help the AfD to a governing majority, can also not be ruled out.

AfD’s state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, called Sunday’s result historic. He is not wrong on the numbers. Should the AfD ultimately convert this into control of a state executive, it would be the first time a party of the far right has led a German state government since 1945.

Pollster Infratest Dimap’s post-election analysis names four issues that decided the vote: collapsing trust in the established parties, social security, the economy, and migration. The order matters.

Migration remains the AfD’s signature issue and its polling has tracked border and asylum debates closely for a decade, but voters in Saxony-Anhalt put institutional trust and economic anxiety ahead of it. That is a harder problem for Germany’s mainstream parties to campaign their way out of than a single policy reversal on asylum, and it is consistent with a pattern across the former East Germany: economic convergence with the former West Germany has stalled, and the parties that ran the post-reunification consensus are the ones paying for it at the ballot box.

The reaction split along predictable lines. Donald Trump and Elon Musk both posted congratulations on social media. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said only “idiots or traitors” could celebrate the result. France’s Europe minister called it a grave moment for the continent. None of that changes the arithmetic in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD is by far the biggest party.

Saxony-Anhalt is a small state. It is also a preview. The AfD has said openly that it treats results like this as a staging post toward the next federal election, likely to be held in 2029, and Sunday gives it its best evidence yet that the strategy is working.

The AfD is currently leading national polls ahead of the next federal election, with support of around 30%.