German immigration restrictionist party wins significant victory in state elections

Widespread concerns over mass immigration in Germany have catapulted the nation’s leading immigration restrictionist party to a major state-level victory, while collapsing support for establishment parties heralds a potential end to the reign of politicians who have enabled mass immigration.

Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland or AfD) captured a staggering 43.8% of the vote in Sunday’s elections for the state government of Saxony-Anhalt, more than doubling AfD’s 2021 election results in the region and delivering the strongest showing in the party’s history. Preliminary official results confirm that AfD will take at least 39 seats in the Saxony-Anhalt legislature, only three seats shy of an outright majority.

The establishment Christian Democratic Union (CDU), led by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, only managed to secure 17.2% of the vote and 15 seats, a fall of nearly 20 points from the party’s 2021 showing. Other parties — namely, the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left — scored less than 10% of the vote each. The AfD victory was underscored by nearly 80% voter turnout, the highest rate seen in Saxony-Anhalt since 1990.

AfD state leader Ulrich Siegmund hailed the election results as a clear “mandate to govern” according to AfD policies and suggested that he would be open to brokering a deal with a minority party to form a coalition government and take an absolute majority of seats in the legislature. The populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which took 5.3% of the vote Sunday and will hold five seats in the legislature, is the only party open to dealing with AfD.

Political persecution against AfD

German establishment figures have long cast AfD as a successor to the Nazi Party, citing AfD’s immigration restrictionist policies. In early 2021, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution of Saxony-Anhalt classified the state’s AfD chapter as a suspected “right-wing extremist” organization, later upgrading AfD’s official designation to that of a “definite right-wing extremist effort” in 2023.

At the national level, AfD has been subjected to similar treatment. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, essentially the German equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation, officially designated AfD’s youth wing as an extremist organization in 2025 and classified AfD itself as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor” in 2025.

The extremist classifications empowered state and federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to surveil AfD and its members, including tapping phone conversations, intercepting email communications, and even placing undercover informants inside the party. A court ruling in February temporarily halted the extremist classification from being applied to AfD while the matter is being litigated.

Immigration issue galvanizes voters

Despite the controversy among political elites over AfD’s immigration restrictionist rhetoric, the party’s policies proved broadly popular with the electorate. Of the Saxony-Anhalt residents who voted for AfD on Sunday, 91% agreed that they are ”very worried too many foreign people live in Germany,” according to exit polling.

AfD campaigned heavily on curbing immigration and restoring public safety and law and order in Saxony-Anhalt, casting itself as an alternative to the establishment parties that did little or nothing in the face of successive waves of immigrants, largely from Muslim countries in the Middle East.

The successful AfD campaign pledged in particular to address the growing Islamization of Germany, emphasizing that supposed refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and other Muslim countries are disproportionately overrepresented in crime statistics and increasingly form parallel communities that do not integrate to German law or culture.

Along with policies such as criminalizing abortion and supporting the growth of German families, the Saxony-Anhalt chapter of AfD lists remigration and the preservation of German culture as policy priorities.

“Islam belongs neither to Germany nor to Saxony-Anhalt,” the party’s platform document reads. “Ultimately, Islam has not shaped our history and culture. As a political religion with its archaic Sharia system and its legal rules, it is incompatible with our Western understanding of the state.”

While AfD acknowledges that religious liberty laws provide for Muslims to practice their religion, the party also insists that the practice of Islam cannot be liberalized to such an extent that it conflicts with and undermines German law and culture.

“The AfD will restore religious freedom to appropriate standards. Religious freedom does not compel Germans to fulfill every wish of the Islamic lobby,” the party’s platform document continues. “Mosques do not have to be clearly recognizable as opulent, oriental buildings. A muezzin's call to prayer is not essential to guarantee the free exercise of religion for Muslims. The AfD government will exhaust all legal means to restrict the influence of this culturally alien religion in Saxony-Anhalt.”

AfD’s rise to power

Claremont Institute fellow Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, suggested that AfD’s major victory in Saxony-Anhalt was due in no small part to the failure of the establishment parties to address serious crises such as mass immigration, economic instability, COVID-19, and others which have emerged as prevalent within the past decade in particular.

“The AfD has risen to prominence because of these crises. Suspicion has arisen across society that the established parties are ill-equipped to deal with the country’s largest problems, and, worse, refuse to be frank and honest about them,” Caldwell wrote in a Sept. 7 essay tracing the origins and rise to influence of AfD.

Caldwell observed that, between 2005 and 2021, the same handful of establishment parties brokered coalition governments together, often with the same executive leadership, so that German voters began to question whether voting even made a difference in real-world policy.

It was these coalition governments which repeatedly handed Angela Merkel the German chancellorship for more than 15 years — and it was Merkel and her deputies who opened the floodgates to mass immigration, importing and resettling millions of largely unvetted “refugees” from the Middle East.

The immigration issue, in particular, motivated voters to abandon the establishment parties which had not only failed to address the problem but had actively facilitated it. The 2015-2016 New Year’s Eve mass sexual assaults stand as a testament to the establishment parties’ failure.

Within a year of Merkel’s sweeping refugee resettlement program being launched, approximately 1,200 women reported being raped or sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in cities all across Germany. Roughly 650 women were raped or sexually assaulted in Cologne and another 400 in Hamburg, while nearly 200 victims were identified in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and other cities.

According to local and federal law enforcement, the rapists and sexual assailants were predominantly immigrants of North African and Middle Eastern descent.

German journalist Harald Martenstein, in a debate last year over whether or not to ban AfD as a political entity, emphasized the fact that establishment parties had failed to address the crises most concerning to the German people, giving rise to AfD's popularity.

“You know that you are not trying to prevent the Fourth Reich, but only to eliminate your political competition,” Martenstein said. “It would be child’s play to keep the AfD down. All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems.”