On Sunday morning a motorcycle stopped outside the polling station in Tangermünde, and the small crowd waiting there began to cheer. Ulrich Siegmund got off, went inside with his wife Julia, voted, and came out again to take selfies with everyone who asked. He told the people around him that he felt a spirit of optimism that day, and that Germany needed to get past its political divisions. He had already said that he would only take the job of state governor if his party won an absolute majority.
By the evening, in the city of Magdeburg, the question was no longer whether Alternative for Germany would win in Saxony-Anhalt, but how big the win would be. The first official count gave the AfD 43.8 per cent, the best result the party has ever had in a German state and twice what it won five years ago. The Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz came second with 17.2 per cent, their worst result ever in the state, and they did not win a single constituency. The Social Democrats took 9.3 per cent, the Greens 8.9 and the Left Party 8.6. The BSW also won enough votes to enter the state parliament.
According to the broadcaster ZDF, 77 per cent of voters took part. At the AfD’s election party, the words on the stage said: Welcome. Anything is possible. When the first results appeared, Siegmund stood arm in arm with the two national leaders of his party, who laughed as they saw how large the victory was. People waved German flags and hugged each other. “We have made history in this country,” Siegmund said. He added that people had made it completely clear that they finally wanted political change, and that they wanted it with his party. Donald Trump posted a picture of the result on Truth Social without any comment.
Siegmund was born in Havelberg in October 1990, three weeks after the reunification of Germany. He trained in wholesale and foreign trade, then studied business psychology and business administration. At 23 he started a company that sold air fresheners. He joined the CDU when he was 18, left six years later, and in 2014 he joined the AfD, which was then one year old.
He became well known online during the pandemic, when he spoke strongly against the coronavirus rules and gained hundreds of thousands of followers. Since then his method has been simple: short phrases, repetition, good humour and no distance between the politician and the voter. He entered the parliament of Saxony-Anhalt in 2016. When his party chose him as its lead candidate in 2025, 98.3 per cent of the delegates voted for him.
The smile is his trademark, and his slogan is that everything will be fine. People waited a long time for a selfie and an autograph.
His programme is much harder than his smile. If the AfD forms the state government, it promises immediate deportations and stricter asylum rules, and it wants to end all state money for integration programmes. It is not clear how much of this a state government could legally do, because decisions about deportation are not made by the states.
Every mainstream party refuses to work with the AfD, and the local branch of the German domestic intelligence service, which watches groups that may be dangerous for democracy, has classified it as right-wing extremist. The small BSW may be its only possible partner. Merz had warned during the campaign that a win for the AfD would damage the state and frighten foreign investors.
On Monday, Merz said that everyone was deeply shaken. He called it the worst election defeat for his party in years, and said that nobody had expected this. Accepting the result is the essence of democracy, he said, but some things cannot be voted on: the rules of living together and the values of the constitution.
At the party in Magdeburg, a man called Antony Lee said it in his own words. He said that Germany and Western Europe needed change, and that a starting signal was going out from here, whether people liked it or not. He was a father and a businessman, he said, and he knew that things could not go on like this in Germany.