A right-wing German party scored a historic victory in a state election Sunday, dealing a blow to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party.
Exit polls in the Saxony-Anhalt state election saw Alternative for Germany — an “extremist” party backed by Elon Musk — secure 44.5% of the vote for its candidates, with Merz’s CDU party only netting 18.5%, the ARD broadcaster reported.
The right-wing party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, hailed the turnout as a “historic” result for her group as she vowed that Merz’s party would never win another election again.
“We are going to see explosive growth across all of East Germany — and at the federal level, too,” she told public broadcaster ZDF.
But the national general-secretary of Merz’s party, Franziska Hoppermann, was defiant in opposing the strengthening party.
“AfD is a right-wing extremist party. It wants to leave the euro; that would be economic downfall. … It works closely together with Russia, it wants a completely different social model,” Hoppermann said. “We will not work with them.”
Either way, Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, told Reuters, “This election result is, above all, a vote of no confidence in the federal government.”
The AfD is pro-Russia and anti-migration and supports such thing as the banning of rainbow flags in schools.
Still it remains to be seen if the party will be able to create its own government in the state, as most other parties have ruled out joining an AfD-led coalition.
Projections of Sunday’s election suggest the AfD would win between 39 and 41 seats of Saxony-Anhalt’s 82-seat state parliament
That still leaves the AfD just short of absolute majority, although much further ahead of other parties.
The left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a potential AfD coalition partner, could make AfD governance possible if it clears the threshold to grab a seat.
The right-wing party remains a controversial group in Germany, with the country’s domestic intelligence service dubbing the group as “right-wing extremist,” a classification that the AfD rejects.
No right-wing party has ever won control of a single German state since World War II.
Voter turnout in Saxony-Anhalt was particularly high at an estimated 78%.
Saxony-Anhalt has the sixth smallest population in the country at just 2.1 million people, with only 7.9% identifying as foreigners, among the smallest percentages in all of Germany, according to national data.
With Post Wires
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