'What Will We Do?' Germany Confronts Its Fears After the Far-Right AfD's Historic Win in Saxony-Anhalt

Itzel Fatiema, a nurse originally from Afghanistan, has been living in Germany for more than twelve years. She cared for patients through a pandemic, but now faces what she describes as a rising tide of hostility that has become impossible for her to ignore. 'I feel stuck and I don't even know what to do about it,' she says. 'My family also lives here with me, and I am also scared about them. What if tomorrow they are asked to leave as well?'

That question has become far more pressing since 6 September. On that day, the so-called Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt – the strongest result for a far-right party in a German state election since the Nazi era – and 39 of the 83 seats in the state parliament, three short of an absolute majority. Merz's Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), who have led the state since 2002, collapsed to 17.2 per cent. Since then, the state network of migrant organisations, LAMSA, says racist attacks have 'exploded', and it has asked the other 15 federal states whether people at risk could shelter there.

What is at stake

What alarms people like Fatiema is not only the volume of the result but the nature of the party that won. Saxony-Anhalt's domestic intelligence service has classified the AfD's state branch as 'confirmed right-wing extremist' since November 2023, citing statements by party officials it deemed anti-Muslim, racist, and antisemitic. It concluded that the party seeks to exclude people because of their origin or religion. A Cologne court ruling in February suspended a separate classification of the federal party branch, but only as an interim measure pending the main proceedings – and it leaves the state branch's classification as right-wing extremist untouched. If the AfD's lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, becomes state premier, his would be the first government led by a party branch carrying this classification, overseeing the very agency that monitors it.

The people Siegmund would bring with him deepen concerns. Several of his closest aides were once members of the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend (HDJ), a neo-Nazi youth group styled on the Hitler Youth that gave children 'racial' instruction at its camps and that the federal government banned in 2009 for its 'essential affinity with National Socialism'. The state party’s press spokesperson Patrick Harr is reportedly lined up to run the state chancellery, while legal adviser Laurens Nothdurft, who became the HDJ's deputy federal leader in 1999, is reportedly slated to become a state secretary in the justice ministry – a ministry with a strong say in appointing judges. Another, Eric Kaden, advises the AfD group on education. Harr says he is 'at peace' with his past. Nothdurft said that he has nothing to answer for. And Siegmund calls them 'outstanding people' and says what happened 20 or 25 years ago does not interest him.

Potsdam political scientist Gideon Botsch has said that the group's 'National Socialist and völkisch imprint' must be assumed to 'continue to have an effect' on former members, if not on every individual.

Who could govern – and how

Whether they get that chance depends on a vote still weeks away. The federal state premier is elected by secret ballot, and in the first two rounds a candidate needs an absolute majority of 42 votes. The CDU, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens and the Left rule out backing Siegmund, and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), with five seats, says it will not vote for him either, though it has held policy talks with the AfD. If the second round fails, parliament has 14 days to decide whether to dissolve itself; if it does not, a third round follows in which a simple majority of votes cast is enough – so an AfD minority government is possible. Until a premier is elected, Sven Schulze's CDU-led government stays on as a caretaker, with no time limit.

The parties' pledges may not settle the matter. On 6 October, the AfD's Tobias Rausch was elected parliament president with 48 votes, more than the AfD and the BSW, which had pledged its support, held together, although the CDU had planned to abstain. Siegmund plans to stand for premier in December.

'All of them help the economy'

For those who would live under such a government, the uncertainty is already felt. Juri Nitsch, a 50-year-old recycling business owner in Magdeburg, says roughly 30 per cent of his workforce are migrants. 'I have never had any problem with migrants, and all of them have been very hard-working,' he says. 'So I don't understand the whole idea behind the remigration, and I am against it.' One of his employees was recently deported under current law, which Nitsch says frightened his other staff – including naturalised Germans who worry about relatives. 'Tomorrow, if they are asked to leave, what will we do?' they ask him.

'If we don't learn from history, then we end up making the same mistake again,' Nitsch says, referring to Germany's dark Nazi era. The Nazi state stripped Jews and other minorities of their rights, deported them and murdered millions. This is why Olaf Scholz, then chancellor, said in January 2024 that meetings discussing how to push part of the population out of the country, with 'remigration' as the keyword, were 'reminiscent of the darkest times in German history'.

What 'remigration' really means

Bruno Steel thinks differently. The 55-year-old from Lutherstadt Wittenberg is among the 43.8 per cent who backed the AfD. 'It has been a long time since a change was required,' he says, and he believes the party shares his view: 'We only need skilled workers, not people coming here illegally... the AfD's remigration plan only focuses on people illegally entering Germany [who] have no right to be here.' A party would be extremist, he said, only if it rejected immigration altogether. But he is wrong, the classification’extremist’ turns on whether a party treats people as unequal because of their origin or religion, not on how much immigration it wants. Steel also said that he was blaming immigrants for rising crime. Yet registered crime fell 5.6 per cent in 2025; when FairPlanet put this to him, he did not accept it, saying things will improve if the AfD comes to power. Non-Germans made up 35.5 per cent of suspects, excluding immigration offences, against about 15 per cent of the population – though suspects are not convicted offenders, and the figures include non-residents.

Steel's is the narrowest reading of 'remigration' – and the one the party itself uses in public. The AfD's state programme defines the term as deporting foreigners obliged to leave, voluntary return schemes and bringing back German workers who emigrated. But the same programme calls for abolishing subsidiary protection, held by many Syrian refugees, and for revoking the protection given to Ukrainians – people living in Germany fully legally. Party figures even go further. Siegmund has described remigration as 'much more than just deportation', something that 'affects all people who do not want to contribute', while party members have called for remigration 'by the millions' – a scale that legal scholar Markus Ogorek says would have to include German citizens.

Days after the election, Siegmund went further still. Asked about a planned plant of the Israeli arms maker Elbit in Sangerhausen, he said military production should not be 'demonised across the board', because suitable means would be needed for later 'remigration and deportation offensives'. The SPD's parliamentary leader, Katja Pähle, said this meant 'talking about violence as a means of politics'. After the outcry, Siegmund clarified that he had meant vehicles and protective equipment for the police and the military. This is a prime example of what linguist Ruth Wodak calls ‘calculated ambivalence’: a provocation reaches the movement, and the subsequent redefinition lets moderate voters believe it was never meant that way.

The term ‘remigration’ was popularised by Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, whose concept includes 'non-assimilated' citizens and which the German Federal Administrative Court found 'contrary to human dignity' in 2025. Siegmund attended the 2023 meeting near Potsdam where Sellner presented it, reportedly telling the gathering that the state could 'very, very easily' be made unattractive for migrants to live in, and he was later voted out as chair of a state parliamentary committee.

David Begrich, who monitors the far right for the Magdeburg association Miteinander, sees a deliberate strategy. He says that Siegmund is 'the personified self-trivialisation of the AfD' – part of a 'double addressing' in which the radical programme speaks to the far-right core while his friendly language, deliberately 'open to interpretation', reaches voters who want normality. Reem Ahmed of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg argues that the party's remigration concept rests on an ethnonationalist idea of belonging, in which being German is not defined by a passport.

It was this broader meaning Merz had in mind when he confronted the AfD three days after the election. ‘If remigration were to become reality, it would be nothing other than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin colour', he told the Bundestag, warning that 'not a single nursing home will function' without migrant workers. The AfD accused him of mischaracterising its position – a defence Siegmund's own words undercut. Sent written questions by FairPlanet, the party replied by email that it would not answer them.

What could change – and what would limit it

Whether Merz's warning comes true depends on what a state government can actually do. Much of the AfD's agenda lies beyond its reach: asylum, residence and citizenship law are all federal matters. Of the programme's 56 migration demands, 21 could only be implemented at federal or EU level. Of the 31 demands that legal scholars Mark Niklas Cuno and Lukas Bornschein identify as potentially falling within a state government’s remit, they consider 18 unlawful. But a state government governs the police, schools and immigration offices, decides which civil society groups receive funding and sets the tone for officials. 'Much of what the AfD wants to change, it doesn't have to be done through legislation,' Begrich warned after the vote. Ahmed expects an AfD government to work through administrative practice – pressuring municipalities, prioritising deportations and cutting support services – in ways that could 'normalise and promote' hostility towards migrants.

The programme points in that direction. It proposes a 'voluntary citizens' watch', curbs on the state’s domestic intelligence service and separate classes for refugee children, which constitutional lawyers say would breach constitutional and EU law. Security researcher Luca Manns of the University of Cologne warns that 'whoever carries out more checks in neighbourhoods with a high share of migrants will find more there'.

There are limits, too: civil servants cannot be dismissed without cause, and state laws can be challenged in the constitutional courts. Other states and federal agencies are discussing restricting the intelligence they share with Saxony-Anhalt. And in April, every party in the outgoing parliament except the AfD passed a constitutional reform under which ending a state treaty – such as the one behind the regional broadcaster MDR – requires parliament's consent, and the state constitutional court is protected against blockades in the election of its judges.

Alarm in the Jewish community

For Germany's Jewish community, these questions are anything but abstract. Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he was 'personally appalled' by the result and that the damage an AfD government could do through education 'is immense'. The fear runs deep in a state where a gunman murdered two people after failing to storm the synagogue in Halle in 2019, and it has spread abroad: the American Jewish Committee called the result 'a grim milestone'.

On 24 September, less than three weeks after the election, a vote in neighbouring federal state Saxony showed how the AfD's view of remembrance – the party has called Germany's Holocaust remembrance culture a 'guilt cult' – plays out where it holds local influence (though the state election in Saxony-Anhalt did not cause it). On 24 September, the council of Heidenau, near Dresden, voted 13 to 6 to reject new Stolpersteine, the brass 'stumbling stones' outside the last homes of victims of the Nazis. The motion was brought jointly by the AfD, the local CDU and a citizens' initiative, which argued that names should not be placed where people walk on them. Education Minister Karin Prien, of Merz's own CDU, called it 'a scandal'.

Across Germany, people have answered with protest. On 12 September, roughly 150,000 people joined rallies in about 20 cities organised by the anti-AfD group Prüf. The Greens, who won a record 8.9 per cent, did not respond to FairPlanet's interview request; their lead candidate, Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz, has warned of an 'exodus' of people with a migration background, some 'already sitting on packed suitcases'.

Why, then, did so many people vote for the AfD? For Dr Anke Hassel, a professor of public policy at Berlin's Hertie School, the result cannot be explained by identity politics alone. 'I would put economic insecurity and deteriorating public services at the centre, while recognising that cultural and identity concerns have their own force,' she says, pointing to weak growth and communities 'disrupted' by the closures that followed reunification. Other research puts the weight elsewhere: a study of more than 110,000 interviews found concern about immigration by far the strongest predictor of AfD support.

An uncertain wait

Whatever drove the vote, those who stand to lose most are the groups the programme names: refugees with subsidiary protection, Ukrainians, refugee children and Muslims, along with the organisations that support them. LAMSA is demanding a legal right to counselling and legal aid in cases of discrimination. Employers are uneasy too: about 71,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the workforce, hold a foreign passport.

For Fatiema, the wait is personal. 'How can we impose any security or other kind of threat to this country?' she asks, noting that many of her fellow nurses are immigrants who keep the hospital running. Going back to Afghanistan is not an option, she said. Her question reaches beyond whether Germany can keep the people it already has. In a country that teaches its children where the stripping of citizens' rights once led, Saxony-Anhalt has handed its largest share of the vote to a party whose state branch is classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist. The test now is whether Germany has learned from that past – and whether its democracy can push back.