The motorcycle pulled up outside the polling station in Tangermünde on Sunday morning, and the small crowd waiting there began to cheer. Ulrich Siegmund climbed off, went in with his wife Julia, cast his ballot and came back out to pose for selfies with anyone who asked. Afterwards he told the people gathered around him that he sensed a spirit of optimism about the day, and that Germany needed to get past its political divisions. He had already made clear he would take the governor’s job only 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 double what it took five years ago. Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats came second on 17.2 per cent, their worst ever showing in the state, and failed to win a single constituency outright. The Social Democrats took 9.3 per cent, the Greens 8.9, the Left Party 8.6. The BSW also cleared the threshold to enter parliament.
The backdrop on the stage at the AfD’s election party carried the words: Welcome. Anything is possible. Turnout, according to the broadcaster ZDF, was 77 per cent. As the first exit polls flashed up, 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 one another. “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 his social network, Truth Social, without comment. Far-right leaders elsewhere in Europe called it a mandate for change.
Saxony-Anhalt is not a large place. It has about 2.14 million inhabitants, borders four other states, and was assembled in 1945 by the Soviet administration out of the Prussian Province of Saxony and the Free State of Anhalt. It was dissolved in 1952, its territory split between the districts of Halle and Magdeburg, and put back together 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, 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 and left six years later, moving in 2014 to the AfD, then one year old.
What he took from his studies, according to one Spanish account, was that simple messages work when they are repeated, 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 picked up hundreds of thousands of followers. The formula since has been short phrases, repetition, good humour and a staging that erases any distance between politician and 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 picked him as its lead candidate in 2025, 98.3 per cent of the delegates backed him.
The smile is the trademark. He has swapped the party’s anger for optimism, running on the slogan that everything will be fine, and people queued at length for a selfie and an autograph.
The programme underneath is not gentle. If the AfD takes the state government, the promise is immediate deportation, with the declared aim of removing as many migrants without residence permits as possible. The party wants tougher asylum rules at every level, more pre-emptive 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 excluded from mainstream schooling, 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 breach international and European law, and deportation decisions are not the state’s to make.
There is more. Schools and cultural institutions pushed towards what the party considers traditional values, rainbow flags banned in schools, the German flag raised daily, the anthem sung by students and staff at school celebrations, refugee children taught in segregated classes, public broadcasting overhauled. Citizen patrols. More Russian taught in schools. No new wind farms. Nationally 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 available partner.
Merz had campaigned by warning that an AfD win would damage the state and frighten off foreign investors. An ARD poll found 87 per cent of the state’s voters 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 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. He noted that the mere list of those who had congratulated the AfD showed how much international attention the result had drawn. When close to 60 per cent of voters back 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, an attendee named Antony Lee put it his own way. “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”.