Saxony-Anhalt: AfD three seats short of majority, and pressure shifts onto Merz

Today’s new development on the Saxony-Anhalt vote is not the result, which this newspaper has already reported, but how the result is being read by voters themselves in post-vote surveys — and the arithmetic consequence for forming the regional government.

The state electoral authority’s final provisional count gives the AfD 43.8% and thirty-nine of the eighty-three Landtag seats: the leading party by a wide margin, but three seats short of the absolute majority threshold, set at forty-two. The CDU stops at 17.2% and fifteen seats. The SPD, Greens and Linke each secure eight seats, the BSW five; the FDP, at 2.6%, remains outside the regional parliament. In the single-member constituencies, the AfD won nearly all forty-one, the Linke three. Turnout was 77.8%, compared with 60.3% in 2021, out of just under 1.7 million eligible voters. The data is as reported by Tagesschau and DIE ZEIT.

List	Votes	Seats
AfD	43.8%	39
CDU	17.2%	15
SPD	9.3%	8
Greens	—	8
Linke	—	8
BSW	—	5
FDP	2.6%	0

The constraint holding everything in place

The decisive factor is not the AfD’s first place but the combination of two conditions. The first: the party, lacking an absolute majority, would remain dependent on a coalition partner. The second: an alternative majority built without the AfD would require the CDU to strike deals with the Linke, incompatible with the party’s internal resolutions. These are the two facts that ORF lays out alongside its polling analysis.

There is also an institutional element weighing on the picture: Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD is classified by the regional office for the protection of the constitution as confirmed far-right.

The bill arrives in Berlin

The post-vote surveys shift the question onto the federal chancellor. According to Infratest dimap’s analysis, 86% of voters reproached the CDU for not keeping its election promises, and approval for Friedrich Merz stood at just 9%. ZDF’s Politbarometer, cited by ZDFheute, records that three-quarters of respondents believe Merz damaged the CDU’s result.

It should be said what these figures measure and what they do not: they are perceptions gathered from a sample of respondents, not a causal reconstruction of the vote. They indicate that a large share of voters attribute the regional defeat to the party’s federal leadership, not that this attribution is correct.

AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla summed up the result by turning the chancellor’s own position on its head, in remarks reported by Der Tagesspiegel:

“Friedrich Merz wanted to halve us, now we’ve halved the CDU” (transl. from German) — Tino Chrupalla, co-chair of the AfD

The SPD and the detail that gets overlooked

One fact often goes unnoticed: the SPD grew, from 8.4% to 9.3%, though remaining below 10%. It is a minimal movement, but it runs in the opposite direction to the CDU, which has lost nearly half its 2021 voters. The round-up of Italian front pages published by Il Post confirms that in Italy the news was read above all through the lens of the chancellor’s crisis.

What we don’t know

We don’t know whether or how a regional government will be formed: the available sources describe the constraint, not an ongoing negotiation. There is no indication in today’s material of any timeline for the new Landtag to be seated, nor of any revision of the CDU’s resolutions on relations with the Linke. The final official result, distinct from the provisional one reported here, has not yet been published.