The motorcycle stopped outside the polling station in Tangermünde on Sunday morning, and the small crowd waiting there started to cheer. Ulrich Siegmund got off, went inside with his wife Julia, cast his ballot and came back out to pose for selfies with anyone who asked. He told the people around him that he could sense a spirit of optimism that day, and that Germany needed to move beyond its political divisions. He had already made one thing clear: he would only take the job of state governor if his party won an absolute majority.
By nightfall in Magdeburg, the question was no longer whether Alternative for Germany would win Saxony-Anhalt, but by how much. The preliminary official count from the regional electoral commission put the AfD at 43.8 per cent, the party’s best result in any German state and twice what it won five years ago. Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats came second with 17.2 per cent, their worst ever result in the state, and they did not win a single constituency outright. The Social Democrats took 9.3 per cent, the Greens 8.9 and the Left Party 8.6. The BSW also passed the threshold needed to enter parliament.
Behind the stage at the AfD’s election party, the backdrop read: Welcome. Anything is possible. Turnout, according to the broadcaster ZDF, was 77 per cent. When the first exit polls appeared on screen, Siegmund stood arm in arm with the party’s two national leaders, who laughed as the scale of the result became clear. People waved German flags and hugged each other. “We have made history in this country,” Siegmund said. “The people have made it absolutely clear that they finally want political change and, above all, they have shown that they want it with us.” Donald Trump posted a screenshot of the result on Truth Social without any comment, and far-right leaders elsewhere in Europe called it a mandate for change.
Saxony-Anhalt is not a big place. It has around 2.14 million inhabitants and borders four other states. It was put together in 1945 by the Soviet administration out of the Prussian Province of Saxony and the Free State of Anhalt, then dissolved in 1952, when its territory was split between the districts of Halle and Magdeburg. It was created again in 1990 with reunification. It has the highest concentration of UNESCO World Heritage sites in Germany, and it is the country’s least religious state: in 2018, only 15.2 per cent of residents belonged to a major Christian denomination.
Siegmund was born in Havelberg in October 1990, three weeks after reunification. He trained as a commercial technician in wholesale and foreign trade, then studied business psychology and business administration. At 23 he founded a company selling air fresheners and scent systems. He joined the CDU at 18, left six years later, and in 2014 moved to the AfD, which was then one year old.
What he took from his studies, according to one Spanish account, was that simple messages work if you repeat them, and that selling is less about placing a product than about producing a feeling. He had worked in sales and at an eye clinic in Berlin. His breakthrough online came during the pandemic, when he sharpened his opposition to coronavirus restrictions and gained hundreds of thousands of followers. Since then the formula has been short phrases, repetition, good humour and a style that removes any distance between the politician and the voter. He entered the Saxony-Anhalt parliament in 2016 and has co-chaired the AfD parliamentary group with Oliver Kirchner since August 2022. When the party chose him as its lead candidate in 2025, 98.3 per cent of the delegates backed him.
The smile is his trademark. He has replaced the party’s anger with optimism, campaigning on the slogan that everything will be fine, and people queued for a long time for a selfie and an autograph.
The programme underneath is not gentle. If the AfD forms the state government, it promises immediate deportations, with the stated aim of removing as many migrants without residence permits as possible. The party wants stricter asylum rules at every level, more detention, compulsory work for asylum seekers, and an end to all state funding for integration programmes, which it calls the asylum industry. It wants children and teenagers without permanent residence kept out of mainstream schools, and a remigration working group inside the state government to coordinate asylum policy. How much of this a state government could legally do is unclear: creating special categories of refugee could break international and European law, and deportation decisions are not taken at state level.
There is more. Schools and cultural institutions pushed towards what the party considers traditional values, rainbow flags banned in schools, the German flag raised every day, the anthem sung by students and staff at school celebrations, refugee children taught in separate classes, public broadcasting reformed. Citizen patrols. More Russian taught in schools. No new wind farms. At national level the party wants to restrict immigration heavily, restore ties with Russia, cut support to Ukraine and leave the euro. Every mainstream party refuses to work with it, and the local branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence service has classified it as right-wing extremist. The small BSW may be the only possible partner.
Merz had campaigned by warning that an AfD victory would damage the state and frighten away foreign investors. An ARD poll found that 87 per cent of the state’s voters were unhappy with the federal government, and Siegmund has called the chancellor the AfD’s best campaigner. “This election result is, above all, a vote of no confidence in the federal government,” said Marcel Fratzscher of the German Institute for Economic Research.
On Monday, Merz said that everyone was deeply shaken. He called it the CDU’s most severe electoral defeat in years, even decades, and said nobody had expected things to turn out this way. Simply the list of those who had congratulated the AfD, he noted, showed how much international attention the result had attracted. When close to 60 per cent of voters support parties that call the country’s democratic institutions into question, he said, that is a result you cannot simply wave away. Accepting the outcome is the essence of democracy, he added, but some things are not put to a vote: the rules of coexistence and the values of the constitution.
At the party in Magdeburg, a man named Antony Lee put it in his own words. “It is clear that we need change in Germany and in Western Europe. And I believe a starting signal is definitely going out from here, whether you like it or not,” he said. “I am a father, I am an entrepreneur, and I know that things cannot continue like this in Germany”.