The AfD has already come first in a state parliamentary election, in Thuringia in September 2024. Thanks to the firewall placed around the AfD by the other parties, none would negotiate with it, leaving it languishing in opposition.
Next-door Sachsen-Anhalt is different. Here, polls put the AfD so far ahead that it may be able to form a majority government all on its own. The rule that an election is but halfway on the road to a new German government could go out of the window on Sunday night.
Even if it falls short of a majority, the AfD has, in Sahra Wagenknecht’s maverick party, the BSW, the possibility of a negotiating partner who might end up choosing to enable a minority AfD government.
Whichever, the parties that have dominated the German practice of centrist coalition since the beginning – the CDU, FDP, SPD and Greens – would be reduced to impotent bystanders.
Yet the greater damage may be done if they are not all bystanders, if the CDU – or at least some of its parliamentarians in Sachsen-Anhalt – decide that secretly voting the AfD into minority government is better than forming a governing coalition in which the second largest party is the far-left Die Linke.
Drawing on four seemingly similar August opinion polls, alongside comparisons with the last election in the state in 2021, this post, written one week before the election, shows how a wide range of parliamentary outcomes remains possible – except, that is, any variety of the standard, German centrist coalition.
For in Sachsen-Anhalt, in 2026, the centre is on the brink of losing control.