Far-right AfD wins vote in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state: Exit polls

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won the Saxony-Anhalt ‌elections in Germany’s east, according to exit polls, becoming the first far-right party to take power at a state level since World War II.The AfD won 44.5 percent of the vote, the ARD broadcaster’s exit polls suggested on Sunday, more than double of the incumbent centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU), with 18.5 percent, who are led by current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.“We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve,” said AfD’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund, 35, after exit poll results came in. “We have made history in this state.”AfD co-leader Alice Weidel also hailed a “historic” result, which has given the far-right party a ‌clear mandate to govern, though it was not immediately clear whether it would be able to form a government.“The reality is the AfD has got the lion’s share of the votes in this election, according to the exit polls. But the question is: is it enough to get them control of the state? Right now, we cannot say for sure,” Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane said from Magdeburg, eastern Germany.The exit polls suggest the party has narrowly missed securing an absolute majority in the state partliament in Magdeburg.Siegmund said he wanted to extend a hand to all parties willing to bring about a fundamental political transformation in the state. However, the AfD will not bend to other parties’ will, he stressed.The AfD has never participated in a ruling coalition in Germany’s 16 states or its federal government, as all other mainstream parties refuse to work with it, a policy infamously known as the “firewall”.Sunday’s result is another blow to the authority of Merz, whose popularity has fallen as ‌his coalition government struggles to revive growth in Europe’s largest economy.His centre-right CDU came a distant second, winning about 18.5 percent, according to exit polls by broadcasters ARD and ZDF.Depending on the eventual count, the CDU’s state leader Sven Schulze would hope to still be able to form a new multi-party coalition to block the AfD from power.AfD has tapped into a sense of nostalgia for communist East Germany as well as lingering resentment about an enduring wealth gap with the west decades after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.In line with the sometimes defiant sense of local “Ossie pride”, Siegmund has often ridden the iconic local Simson bike, including to the polling booth Sunday in his hometown of Tangermuende.While Siegmund has been dubbed the friendly face of the AfD, his campaign promises have been radical, including targeting undocumented migrants with a “remigration and deportation offensive” from day one.AfD’s agendaThe party’s anti-“woke” agenda also includes promises to replace LGBTQ pride rainbow flags at public schools with the German standard, and to change history teaching to lessen the emphasis on the Third Reich.In order to replace migrant workers, the AfD wants to lure back German expatriates, while offering “baby bonuses” for families to reverse the shrinking of the population in the small state of 2.1 million people.The German Economic Institute has warned the AfD’s immigration policy would be “ruinous” for Saxony-Anhalt, which is highly reliant on foreign-born workers, especially in the health sector.Others have voiced fears an AfD-run state security apparatus could leak sensitive information to Russia, which Moscow could use to destabilise Germany.The Kremlin “makes no secret of the fact that the AfD is the most important instrument for destabilising Germany for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Thuringia state interior minister Georg Maier told the Handelsblatt daily.