Poll surge puts Germany's AfD on the brink of a historic state election win

Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party is on course to win Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt outright, according to polling released this week, a result that would make it the first far-right party to lead a German state government since the end of World War II.

An Insa survey fielded between August 26 and September 1 put the AfD at 41 to 42%, more than nineteen points clear of the governing Christian Democrats (CDU) at around 22 to 23%. The Left party polled third at roughly 11.5 to 13%, followed by the Social Democrats near 8.5% and the Greens near 6%. Under Germany's mixed electoral system, voters in Saxony-Anhalt's 41 constituencies cast two ballots — one for a local representative, one for a party list that determines each party's overall share of seats — with polls open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on September 6.

A watershed vote, and a legal fight over labels

The state's AfD branch, led by Ulrich Siegmund, has campaigned on immigration and cost-of-living grievances in a region that has trended rightward since reunification. If the polling holds and the party translates its vote share into a majority or near-majority of seats, party leaders have suggested it could attempt to govern alone rather than seek coalition partners, according to Al Jazeera's reporting on the race.

The prospect has drawn renewed attention to how German authorities classify the party. State-level domestic intelligence offices in Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia have each designated their regional AfD branches as "gesichert rechtsextremistisch" — confirmed right-wing extremist — findings upheld in part by a 2025 ruling from the Magdeburg administrative court. The federal domestic intelligence agency applied the same label to the national party in May 2025, but that classification was suspended in February 2026 after the Cologne administrative court ruled, in an emergency proceeding, that the agency could not maintain it while a fuller legal challenge from the AfD proceeds, according to reporting from the fact-checking outlet Correctiv. The underlying dispute over how to characterize the party, in other words, remains unresolved in the courts even as voters head to the polls.

Security officials watch closely

Beyond domestic politics, an AfD-led state government would gain routine access to security-sensitive material shared between federal and state authorities — a prospect that has unsettled some officials given the party's sympathetic posture toward Moscow. Federal security officials have privately voiced concern that intelligence passed to a Russia-friendly state administration could complicate coordination on military and counter-espionage matters that touch European security more broadly.

Saxony-Anhalt, a state of roughly 2.1 million people in eastern Germany, last voted in 2021, when the CDU won with about 37% and the AfD finished second. The scale of Sunday's expected swing — and the possibility that a single far-right party could govern a German state without coalition partners for the first time since 1945 — has made the vote a focal point for parties across the political spectrum, including the establishment coalition partners in Berlin, who have campaigned heavily against the AfD in the race's closing days according to the state parliament's own election dossier. Official, certified results are not expected until polls close Sunday evening, per the state statistics office overseeing the count, though exit polls should offer an early signal of whether Saxony-Anhalt is about to make history.