Saxony-Anhalt: At 43.8%, the AfD No Longer Needs the Firewall to Fall — It's Climbing Over It
With 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 seats, the AfD is within touching distance of an absolute majority in Saxony-Anhalt. The real story isn't the score: it's that a small party polling 5.3%, the BSW, could hand it the first far-right state government in Germany since 1945 — and that the famous 'firewall' no longer depends on the big parties.
The verdict came down on Sunday: the AfD won 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU, relegated to 17.2%. The far-right party takes 39 of the regional parliament's 83 seats — just three seats short of an absolute majority. Merz said he was "deeply shocked" and acknowledged his party's "most severe defeat" in decades, adding that there could be no "return to business as usual."
We analyzed before the election what such a score would mean. What's new is that it has happened — and beyond the projections. Above all, one arithmetical detail changes everything: Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW, credited with 5.3%, has not ruled out governing with the AfD. If these numbers hold, the first far-right government of a German state since the Second World War would depend neither on the CDU nor the SPD, but on a party born of the radical left. The famous "firewall," which the mainstream press presents as the business of the "respectable" parties, can be bypassed from the margins.
For the Jews of Germany — and of Europe — the announced program deserves to be read as written: deportations of immigrants, defunding of "anti-German art," and reduced teaching of the Nazi past in schools. That last point is the one that should alarm our community most. The AfD sometimes calls itself a friend of Israel; a party that wants to teach German children less about the Shoah answers the objection all by itself. We judge on actions and programs, not on declarations of convenience.
The congratulations are telling in themselves: Vox in Spain, Chega in Portugal, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Elon Musk ("Well done") — and a calculated silence from Donald Trump, who posted a screenshot of the results without comment, immediately relayed by Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin's emissary. That last detail says it all: in Warsaw, Donald Tusk summed up the Polish reading in one brutal sentence — "only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD." A pro-Russian party at the gates of German regional power is also a victory for the axis that arms Israel's enemies.
And this is where the lesson goes beyond Germany. Benjamin Haddad spoke of a "grave moment for Europe"; it's worth recalling that Marine Le Pen leads every poll for the 2027 French presidential election. Saxony-Anhalt reveals a mechanism France would do well to ponder: when governing parties treat the "fears of the population" — the phrase is Merz's own — with contempt or denial, the voter no longer settles for protesting; he hands over power. For the Jews of France, the compass remains the same: neither ritual panic nor naivety. Demand that the mainstream parties finally answer the insecurity and the Islamism that feed these scores — because it's their failure, not just the victory of the extremes, that was on display Sunday night in Saxony-Anhalt.