Saxony-Anhalt poll: 'A huge blow for the CDU, but also a huge win for the AfD'

Carys Garland is pleased to welcome Markus Ziener, Visiting Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He interprets the AfD’s breakthrough in Saxony-Anhalt as a potentially historic turning point in post-war German politics. For Ziener, the significance lies not only in the scale of the far right’s electoral success, but also in the constituency behind it: many AfD voters, he argues, were previously politically disengaged rather than simply defecting from established parties. This complicates conventional explanations of the result as a straightforward transfer of support from the CDU to the AfD and raises a deeper question about the political expectations of a newly mobilised electorate. At the same time, Ziener draws an important distinction between electoral strength and governing capacity. Saxony-Anhalt’s limited powers mean that even an AfD-led government could struggle to fulfil major promises on migration, Ukraine and other national policy questions. The immediate consequences may therefore be felt most strongly elsewhere: in the destabilisation of the established parties and, particularly, in mounting pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Ziener portrays the result as a challenge reaching “to the core of his chancellorship,” with further regional elections threatening to turn a state-level defeat into a broader test of Germany’s political direction.