Polls closed in Saxony-Anhalt at six o’clock on Sunday evening. By half past ten, the projections published by the two public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF, had the Alternative für Deutschland on 44 per cent of second votes, 23.2 points above its 2021 result, and the Christian Democrats on between 17.5 and 17.8 per cent, 19.3 points below theirs. The Social Democrats were on 9 to 9.2 per cent, the Greens on 8.9 to 9, the Left on 8.6 to 8.9, and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht on 5 to 5.1 in its first contest for this parliament. The Free Democrats, on 2.4 to 2.5 per cent, fell short of the threshold.
The returning officer’s portal reported all 2,661 electoral districts counted at 3.21 on Monday morning. The preliminary official result, as carried by the German press agency dpa: AfD 43.8 per cent, CDU 17.2, SPD 9.3, Greens 8.9, Left 8.6, BSW 5.2, FDP 2.6. Turnout was 77.8 per cent, against 60.3 five years ago — the highest in a Saxony-Anhalt state election since reunification.
The figure that carries the most information is not any party’s share but that turnout. Nearly three in ten adults who stayed at home in 2021 did not this time, and a count, like a projection, cannot say where they went.
The AfD takes 39 seats in a chamber of 83 in every report; the smaller parties’ seat counts differ between them by one, because German state parliaments change size with overhang and levelling seats and the allocation is the last thing to settle. Who forms a government was not settled on the night either. The CDU has ruled out a coalition, or any similar cooperation, with the AfD and with the Left; the BSW has said it will not vote for the CDU’s candidate for premier.
A state election decides a state. It does not change the arithmetic of the Bundestag, and Saxony-Anhalt, with about 1.7 million voters, is one of the smaller eastern states. What it does do is convert an opinion poll into a count, and counts have a weight that polls do not. This one is now in.