Feeling left behind after decades of economic decline, voters in the former communist Saxony-Anhalt have rallied around Ulrich Siegmund, turning him into a political celebrity. His success could force the CDU into an awkward choice over a political firewall designed to keep extremists out of power.
On September 6, Saxony-Anhalt’s two million voters could hand Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) its strongest result yet. And with it, put its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, within reach of becoming the first AfD state premier in the Federal Republic’s history. On his way up, he could tear down the so-called Brandmauer, a firewall, with which Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to govern alongside the AfD since it rose to prominence.
A recent Infratest dimap survey has the party at 42 per cent, twenty points clear of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on 22 per cent. Other projections similarly hover above 40 per cent and project the AfD just short of the roughly 50 per cent that an absolute majority requires.
If Siegmund clears 50 per cent, he can govern alone and the firewall falls. If he falls short, it is on the CDU to get creative with its options to keep the Brandmauer standing.
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God-forsaken Saxony-Anhalt
Saxony-Anhalt was part of communist East Germany, and a state that has gotten the bad end of the stick for decades after Germany’s reunification. With the collapse of local industry and the brain drain that followed, the region is now the oldest and most sharply declining population in Germany.
According to Jens Hönisch, an election analyst at the public broadcaster MDR, the AfD’s rise in Saxony-Anhalt is driven above all by economic weakness and collapsing trust in the federal government. Voters hold a feeling of having been left behind, expressed in everything from high living costs to the wind turbines spreading across the countryside.
Yet it is migration, Hönisch notes, that mobilises AfD supporters most, even in a state where just eight per cent of residents are foreign nationals, far below the national average. That has been the centrepiece of AfD’s campaign messaging.
What AfD promises, however, does not look like it will be what they will actually deliver. A recent study by the Halle Institute for Economic Research found that an AfD administration governing on its election programme would leave Saxony-Anhalt facing an annual budget shortfall of at least €2.2 billion. The state already carries one of the highest per-capita debt levels in Germany at roughly €25 billion.
The AfD’s restrictive migration policy will also only further worsen a region which is in need of an increased labour pool.
An extremist organisation that loves TikTok
The Saxony-Anhalt branch of the AfD was classified as a “confirmed far-right extremist organisation” by Germany’s domestic intelligence service in 2023, and has been under heightened surveillance since. But at the same time, Siegmund has adopted an in person and online persona that had made him a leading face of local politics.
Siegmund started TikTok during Covid and now has over 800,000 followers. His main rival, the CDU’s Sven Schulze, the current state premier, has around 4,200 followers. When Siegmund attends his rallies, he is greeted like a celebrity.
Der Spiegel put him on the cover, titled “The most dangerous man in Germany”, his supporters began bringing copies to rallies for him to autograph. “I take all this with humour,” Siegmund told Le Monde. “If it’s not a criminal or a terrorist or a murderer who is considered dangerous, but me, who loves this country — it speaks for itself.”
The Brandmauer
The Brandmauer was an understanding among Germany’s mainstream parties to not work with extremists which hardened as the AfD rose. Retrospectively, the agreement may have backfired and help propel the AfD to where it is now.
Thorsten Benner, of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) told Foreign Policy that he fears removing AfD from governance allowed supporters to increasingly back ever more radical positions without the risk of ever having to live with the consequences. The result is a growing following that has no real repercussion to pushing the rhetoric further and further.
In a recent ARD-DeutschlandTrend survey by Infratest dimap, Germans are now split evenly (47 per cent for, 47 per cent against) on whether the CDU is right to rule out cooperation with the AfD.
The CDU’s reckoning
Chancellor Friedrich Merz is at risk of eating his words. In his first bid for the CDU leadership in 2018, he vowed to cut the AfD’s support in half and return his party to 40 per cent in the polls.
Instead the AfD has roughly doubled its support, taking 20.8 per cent in the 2025 federal election and overtaking the CDU in national surveys since. Merz also used AfD votes to pass a non-binding migration motion in the Bundestag, later conceding the move was a “deviation” from his promises.
In 2018 the CDU also created an “incompatibility resolution”, which formally barred itself from working with either the AfD or the far-left Die Linke. Now, in Saxony-Anhalt, it might have to breach that rule in the other direction, and reach for Die Linke instead.
“This is a credibility question for the conservative party in Germany,” is how it was out on DW’s Berlin Briefing. Continuing that Germany’s electoral system was “designed to avoid extreme outcomes”. Now, “this system will be tested to the limits”.
(Editor’s note: In the meantime, Friedrich Merz has ruled out a coalition with either the AfD or Die Linke.)
