AfD projected to win 40% in Saxony-Anhalt. Should Jews worry?

Why are Germans watching an election in Saxony-Anhalt, a former East German state with 1.7 million registered voters? Because a projected 40% result could give the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, its biggest achievement since the party was founded in 2013.

Such a result could shape elections soon afterward in Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Pomerania and Berlin. There is also an outside chance that it could open the way to an AfD-led government in Saxony-Anhalt, which would be the far right’s first state government in Germany since the end of World War II. That outcome is considered unlikely, but the party’s state website declares: “Everything is possible.”

Pundits say voters in the economically depressed state are responding to the AfD’s anti-immigrant and anti-European Union rhetoric, its promise to expel non-citizens, its emphasis on German national pride and its aim of repairing relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The message resonates especially in former East German states, where factories closed after reunification and younger workers left for western Germany. The party has also gained ground in western states, winning 19% in Baden-Württemberg’s election last March, nearly twice its previous tally there.

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Everything is possible.

The AfD finished second in the 2025 federal election, behind the Christian Democratic Union, and opinion polls now show it as the leading party if a federal election were held today. Some observers say the party could not implement its national agenda. They remain concerned about what it could do at state level.

Stephan Kramer, head of Thuringia’s domestic intelligence agency and a former general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told the JTA that the main concern was the party’s potential control over the interior ministry, police, state intelligence service, education, appointments and sensitive information. “For the first time, the party could use the machinery of a state government and thereby gain substantially greater political and institutional influence,” he said.

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For the first time, the party could use the machinery of a state government and thereby gain substantially greater political and institutional influence.