The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could emerge as the strongest party in two key state elections in eastern Germany on Sunday. Meanwhile, a newly established party founded by a prominent leftist is bent on shaking up the political picture even further as Germany’s national government remains mired in unpopularity.
The country’s main opposition conservative party hopes to withstand the AfD surge in Saxony and Thuringia but the outlook seems bleak for the three parties that make up Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition. Voters are increasingly disillusioned with the coalition’s ceaseless infighting. A stagnant economy plus other problems have not helped.
A win for AfD in Sunday’s elections would send a clear message about how the party could fare in Germany’s national election due next year. A key question is whether it could form a coalition to govern since all other parties seem unwilling to put it in power. As things stand, AfD’s growing strength promises to make the formation of new regional state governments complicated and difficult.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has AfD’s branches in Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups. The AfD leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, is appealing his conviction of knowingly using a Nazi slogan at political events. Depending on how badly the national governing parties perform, that could leave the CDU looking for improbable coalition partners. The party has long refused to ally with Bodo Ramelow’s Left Party, but has not ruled out working with Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW.
CDU national leader, Friedrich Merz, is on record as saying “we can’t work with” AfD.
Support for AfD and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, each of them strongest in Germany’s formerly communist east, has been boosted by general dissatisfaction about the national government. The poor results Scholz’s divisive alliance obtained in June’s European Parliament election reflect this. Internal disputes have grown ever more toxic over the summer, fueled in large part by rows over the 2025 budget.
As for Sunday, Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats and the environmentalist Greens, which are junior partners in both outgoing regional governments, now face the risk of falling below the 5% voter support required if they are to stay in the state legislatures.
The mainstream opposition Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, which has led Saxony since German reunification in 1990, hopes for a repeat of its victory over AfD five years ago. Surveys in Thuringia show CDU trailing AfD, which means CDU will have to rely on its ability to form a governing coalition.
Wagenknecht, long a well known figure of the left, formed her new party recently and is already outperforming the party she left. Known by its German acronym BSW, her new party combines left-wing economic policy with a migration-sceptic agenda.
AfD has tapped into high anti-immigration sentiment in the region, with one campaign poster in Thuringia promising “summer, sun, remigration”. At national level, AfD’s Alice Weidel condemned both the governing parties and the CDU for their “policy of uncontrolled mass immigration” following last week’s knife attack in Solingen in which a suspected extremist from Syria is accused of killing three people.
Another contentious issue is Germany’s position regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine. Berlin is Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of weapons after the United States, something both AfD and BSW oppose. Wagenknecht condemned the recent decision by Berlin and Washington to begin deployments of long-range missiles to Germany in 2026. She has declared that her party will only join state governments that have a “clear position for diplomacy and against the preparation of war.”
