BERLIN – The far-right Alternative for Germany could become the strongest party for the first time in two state elections Sunday in eastern Germany, while a months-old party founded by a prominent leftist also hopes to shake up the picture as the national government has squabbled its way to deep unpopularity.
Germany's main opposition conservative party hopes to keep Alternative for Germany at bay in Saxony and Thuringia, home to around 4.1 million and 2.1 million people, respectively. But prospects look grim for the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's governing coalition, whose constant infighting has added to a flatlining economy and other problems to turn voters off.
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Wins for Alternative for Germany, or AfD, would be a potent signal for the party just over a year before the next national election is due. But it would most likely need a coalition partner to govern, and it's highly unlikely anyone else will agree to put it in power. Even so, its strength could make forming new state governments extremely difficult.
Problem in Berlin
High ratings for AfD and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, both at their strongest in Germany's formerly communist east, have been fed in part by discontent with the national government. Scholz's alliance argued throughout the campaign for the European Parliament election in June and obtained dismal results. The internal hostilities have intensified over a summer plagued by disagreements about the 2025 budget.
Scholz's center-left Social Democrats, the environmentalist Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats were weak in these two states to start with, though the former two parties are the junior partners in both outgoing regional governments. They now risk dropping under the 5% support needed to stay in the state legislatures.
Scholz said recently that “gun smoke from the battlefield” is masking the successes of his government of uneasy allies, which set out to modernize Germany. Justice Minister Marco Buschmann said that the government isn't a “self-help group.” One of the Greens' national leaders, Omid Nouripour, described the coalition as a “transitional government.”
The mainstream opposition Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, won the European Parliament election. It has led Saxony since German reunification in 1990 and hopes that governor Michael Kretschmer can power it past AfD again, as he did five years ago. In Thuringia, surveys show it trailing AfD, but it hopes to cobble together a governing coalition.
Thuringia's politics are particularly complicated because the Left Party of governor Bodo Ramelow has slumped into electoral insigificance nationally. Wagenknecht, long one of its best-known figures, left last year to form a new party that is now outperforming it.
Migration, war and peace
AfD has tapped into high anti-immigration sentiment in the region, with one campaign poster in Thuringia promising “summer, sun, remigration” and depicting a plane with the logo “Deportation-Hansa.”
A national AfD leader, Alice Weidel, assailed both the governing parties and the CDU — which previously ran Germany under Angela Merkel — for their “policy of uncontrolled mass immigration” following last week's knife attack in Solingen in which a suspected extremist from Syria is accused of killing three people.
Wagenknecht's new party, known by its German acronym BSW, combines left-wing economic policy with a migration-skeptic agenda. The CDU also has stepped up pressure on the national government for a tougher stance on migration.
Germany's stance toward Russia's war in Ukraine is also an issue in these eastern states. Berlin is Ukraine's second-biggest weapons supplier after the United States; those weapons deliveries are something both AfD and BSW oppose. An AfD poster combining the German and Russian flags declares that “Peace is Everything!”
Wagenknecht also has assailed a recent decision by the German government and the U.S. to begin deployments of long-range missiles to Germany in 2026. She has declared that her party will only join state governments that have a “clear position for diplomacy and against the preparation of war.”
Who will govern with whom?
AfD secured its first mayoral and county government posts last year, but the party hasn't yet joined a state government. In June, national co-leader Tino Chrupalla said that “the sun of government responsibility must rise for us in the east.”
That doesn't look likely in Saxony and Thuringia, where no other party wants to join it in a coalition. The domestic intelligence agency has AfD's branches in both states under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups. Its leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has been convicted of knowingly using a Nazi slogan at political events, but is appealing.
Depending on how badly the national governing parties perform, that could leave the CDU looking for improbable coalition partners. The party has long refused to ally with Ramelow's Left Party, which is descended from East Germany's communist party, but hasn't ruled out working with Wagenknecht's BSW.
The CDU's national leader, Friedrich Merz, told the RND newspaper group that “we can't work with” AfD.
“That would kill the CDU,” he said.