AfD Wins Saxony-Anhalt, Eyes First Far-Right Government — SkimNews
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- AfD won 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt, a plurality just shy of a majority, and is now negotiating with other factions to form a coalition government that would be Germany's first far-right state government since the Nazis.
- Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the result has shaken the center-right CDU "to its very foundations," with state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern scheduled later this month.
- The Trump administration has publicly and privately backed AfD, and Elon Musk spoke at an AfD rally last year — an unprecedented level of US interference in a European ally's partisan politics, per the article.
- AfD's 2025 platform calls for "remigration" mass deportations targeting Syrians and Afghans alongside a blood-based citizenship definition; Thuringia leader Björn Höcke has been convicted twice for using a Nazi slogan in public.
- German intelligence has AfD under surveillance as extremist, and Die Welt found four top Saxony-Anhalt AfD officials were members of a banned neo-Nazi group, with leader Ulrich Siegmund seen "arm-in-arm with men wearing neo-Nazi attire."
- The Brandmauer cordon sanitaire faces its biggest test as AfD courts the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) as a coalition partner — a formal partnership would mark AfD's official reentry into "polite German society."
Why it matters: Saxony-Anhalt is small, but a successful AfD coalition there would crack Germany's anti-far-right firewall and legitimize a party under surveillance as extremist by its own intelligence services. With national polls showing AfD would now beat Merz's CDU and two more state elections coming this month, the CDU faces an existential crisis. The Trump administration's open backing of AfD reveals a foreign policy built around cultivating far-right allies abroad, not the "America First" restraint it touts at home.
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