Politics 4 min read By Arthur Ellington
BSW’s five seats turn AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt victory into a test of Germany’s firewall
AfD won 43.8% and 39 of 83 seats, short of a majority. BSW’s five MPs could supply the missing votes, with both parties challenging Berlin’s current policy of military support for Ukraine.
AfD’s record victory in Saxony-Anhalt has produced a result that is decisive without being conclusive. The party won 43.8% of the second vote and 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament, according to the preliminary official count. An absolute majority requires 42 seats, leaving AfD three short of governing alone.
The balance may therefore sit with the five MPs elected for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, BSW. The party crossed the threshold with 5.3% of the vote. AfD and BSW together hold 44 seats, enough for a parliamentary majority on paper. No coalition has been agreed, and the distinction matters: the election has created leverage for BSW, not a pre-packaged government.
Before polling day, BSW’s Saxony-Anhalt leadership had already signalled that it did not accept a blanket refusal to work with AfD. Lead candidate Claudia Wittig argued that a party polling around 40% could not simply be excluded. BSW instead promoted a “citizens’ government” led by a non-party minister-president and supported by shifting parliamentary majorities. Such a model could allow cooperation on individual votes without a conventional coalition contract.
The alternative arithmetic is awkward. The CDU, which had led the state government, collapsed to 17.2% and 15 seats. The SPD won 9.3%, the Greens 8.9% and the Left 8.6%, with eight seats each. A CDU-SPD-Green combination reaches only 31 seats. Keeping AfD out of government would therefore require a broader and politically more complicated arrangement.
The national significance lies partly in foreign policy. AfD and BSW are not interchangeable parties, but they overlap on a central question facing Berlin: Germany’s support for Ukraine. AfD’s federal leadership has called for all military aid to Ukraine to end. The party’s programme also advocates lifting EU sanctions on Russia and expanding economic ties with Moscow.
BSW’s official position is framed around ending arms deliveries, pursuing a ceasefire and prioritising negotiations with Russia. Its Saxony-Anhalt programme also calls for energy to be sourced from all suppliers and explicitly supports talks with Russia. Those positions create a substantive area of common ground between the two parties even if they remain apart on other domestic and economic issues.
A state government in Magdeburg would not itself control German weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Those decisions are taken at federal level, and the government in Berlin reiterated in the summer that Germany would continue military, financial and humanitarian support for Ukraine while maintaining pressure on Russia. The immediate effect of the election is therefore political rather than executive: it strengthens parties seeking to reverse the federal line.
That matters for Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the CDU because the result was delivered with turnout of 77.8%, not by a disengaged electorate. AfD gained 23 percentage points compared with 2021 while the CDU fell sharply. The question for Germany’s political firewall is no longer simply whether other parties refuse a coalition with AfD. It is whether BSW’s five MPs are prepared to supply the votes that transform an electoral breakthrough into governing power.
Coalition talks will now determine whether the 44-seat AfD-BSW arithmetic becomes a functioning majority or remains only a number. Either way, Saxony-Anhalt has created a new institutional problem for Berlin: a radical challenger has won overwhelmingly, and a small anti-establishment party now holds the votes that could decide whether that victory reaches the executive.
