“A political nightmare for Friedrich Merz”: Press reactions to the Saxony-Anhalt election

The AfD’s strong showing in Saxony-Anhalt has prompted German-language newspapers to warn of a difficult new political landscape, with the CDU suffering what the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called its “worst nightmare.”

The NZZ said no one could yet know how the state would be governed, and warned that forming a majority could prove difficult. It argued that voters had backed fundamental political change because they no longer trusted the centrist parties, including the CDU, to deliver it. The political pendulum, the paper said, had not merely swung to the right but swept across the centre, leaving behind a dangerous lesson: compromise could be viewed as weakness and balance as betrayal.

The AfD now faced the task of turning its triumphant election result into a parliamentary majority, the NZZ wrote. A party winning more than 40 percent could perhaps still be kept out of government, but it could no longer be politically isolated. It would also have to show how far its desire for power extended when achieving it required talks and compromises. If party leader Ulrich Siegmund failed, other parties would have to act. A CDU-led government involving or supported by the SPD, Greens and Left Party would be constitutionally legitimate, the paper said, but politically difficult and hard to explain to voters after the result.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung focused on the broader national implications. It said voters seeking to place security, the economy and society in the hands of politicians who could make Germany a pawn of major powers and a romantic, neurotic popular belief “do not know what they are doing.” The paper argued that there would be no clean break, either in Saxony-Anhalt or at federal level. Despite justified criticism of the coalition’s shortcomings, it said, voters should recognize that democratic politics means pursuing what is possible rather than destruction or ideological purity. The coalition’s tragedy was that, in the emerging two-camp landscape, it had complaints rather than celebration on its side.