The far-right AfD party won the Saxony-Anhalt state election in Germany on Sunday, with 43.8% and 39 of 83 seats, a landslide and the party’s first state win, three short of a majority. The centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) collapsed to 17.2% and 15 seats; the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) took 9.3% and eight seats; the Greens 8.9% and eight; the left-wing Die Linke 8.6% and eight seats; Sahra Wagenknecht’s left-conservative BSW 5.3% and five seats.
Turnout hit a record 77.8%, in part due to a protest vote against Berlin: Infratest dimap found 59% treated the ballot as a rebuke to Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s coalition, and 86% said that the CDU had not kept its promises.
The big question is which party and which camp can form a government, and get the police and the schools in a climate that is already the harshest in decades for Jewish voters who live behind security. Every possible government carries problems for the local Jewish communities in different ways.
Saxony-Anhalt’s next government will not touch foreign policy or asylum law. But it does control the police and the classroom, setting what children learn about Israel, antisemitism and the Nazi Party years.
That is not a minor thing given the state’s history: the Halle synagogue, the state’s largest Jewish community, is where a 2019 gunman murdered two people after failing to breach its doors on Yom Kippur. Since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and resulting massacred of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitism nationwide has darkened: RIAS, Germany’s antisemitism monitor, recorded nearly 1,000 verified cases in the following month alone (Associated Press, Nov. 28, 2023).
In Saxony-Anhalt, RIAS recorded 270 incidents in 2025, up 33.7%: 81 from the far right, 39 from a left-wing “anti-imperialist” milieu, 30 from anti-Israel activism (American Jewish Committee, July; Süddeutsche Zeitung/dpa, June 4), which is proof the threat runs in more than one direction.
Who governs
The election result presents a real dilemma, as no party has a clear path to a working government. Complicating matters is the boycott of AfD: Mainstream parties have refused to govern with the party since the mid-2010s, when it hardened anti-migration positions, and in this state was classed as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization.
AfD holds 39 seats; CDU, SPD, Greens and Die Linke combined also hold exactly 39. BSW, with five, is the only bloc that can tip either side to the 42 needed to govern. Whichever camp gets there first will do it with BSW or by peeling defectors from the other. AfD needs either BSW’s five votes or three defectors from another party.
AfD’s leadership is working both options at once: Co-leader Alice Weidel called a government with BSW “interesting,” while co-leader Tino Chrupalla appealed directly to individual conservative CDU lawmakers to break with Minister-President Sven Schulze and join a “bourgeois conservative majority.”
Siegmund himself stayed publicly firmer, ruling out toleration or a minority government, even while telling reporters he had spoken overnight with politicians from other parties about switching sides (Tagesspiegel). Keeping both doors open gives AfD more than one route to 42: No single defector, and no single party, can act as if it is AfD is only way in.
Excluding AfD is just as hard: CDU rules out governing with the left directly, so even reaching that combined 39 requires informal toleration, not a coalition—the arrangement a CDU governor used two years ago in Thuringia. Getting from 39 to 42 still needs BSW or defectors from AfD. Or Schulze does not choose at all: Saxony-Anhalt removed its deadline for electing a premier in 2020, so he could stay on as caretaker leader indefinitely.
BSW will not formally join AfD. But the two parties overlap heavily on migration, welfare policy and opposition to arms for Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, which makes abstaining an easy choice for BSW, not a costly one. BSW has also called for ending German arms exports to Israel and calls Israel’s war against Iran an “illegal war of aggression,” exactly the kind of position Jewish community leaders warn against handing any influence to in Magdeburg.
Other parties also show clear points of concern for the local Jewish communities. AfD is co-led by Alice Weidel, who holds the most moderate line on Jews and Israel the party offers, once calling AfD “the only protector of the Jewish people.” But AfD’s state party is dominated by a camp classified by state intelligence as right-wing extremist and closer to Thuringia’s Björn Höcke, who calls German Holocaust remembrance a suffocating “guilt cult.”
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, floated for education minister, when asked about the Nazi era, called it “the darkest chapter in German history,” but added that “all of that happened a long time ago and no longer affects us in the here and now” (The Times of Israel). He has also been flagged by the AJC for antisemitic remarks and ethnic-nationalist politics. That is the other AfD.
Inessa Myslitska, chair of the Landesverband Jüdischer Gemeinden Sachsen-Anhalt and of the Synagogen-Gemeinde zu Magdeburg, told Deutsche Welle on Aug. 30 that she respects any democratic election result, but added: “I see it as my responsibility to say clearly: an AfD-led state government would cause me great concern for democratic culture, the culture of remembrance, the protection of minorities, and the open society in Saxony-Anhalt.”
Sven Schulze’s CDU lost half its support and his own seat, falling from 37.1% to 17.2%, conceding it “has no governing mandate left.”
CDU still funds the Jewish community and renewed its legal treaty with them in April. Nationally, though, CDU leads the coalition that enacted a temporary arms suspension to Israel over Gaza in 2025, and Germany’s antisemitism commissioner said in June that left-wing and migrant-linked antisemitism had been underestimated, calling Islamist antisemitism “highly dangerous.”
Merz warned that Berlin would intervene if an AfD government crossed constitutional lines.
SPD and the Greens offer no escape either. SPD’s Armin Willingmann runs the state’s universities as science minister and shares nationally in Germany’s arms suspension to Israel over Gaza. The Greens outperformed every poll, at 8.9%; its youth wing has pushed for a fuller embargo, and Green-linked campus occupations have treated Jewish students as collateral to Palestine politics.
Eva von Angern’s Die Linke is the likely dealmaker for any government excluding AfD and the most anti-Israel party: Its federal group files inquiries on arms exports to Israel, and anti-Israel groups linked to the party have campaigned locally against an Israeli defense investment. The left wants real influence, not just toleration—exactly the leverage a state education ministry would give it.
Max Privorozki, chairman of the Jewish community of Halle, was asked whether handing education or universities to Die Linke or the Greens would change the climate for Jews in Halle and the way Israel is covered in schools.
His answer: “First, a distinction should be made between the parties Die Linke (The Left) and Bündnis 90/Die Ggrünen (Alliance 90/The Greens). Left-wing ideology often intermingles with Islamism. Dangerous antisemitism frequently hides behind the guise of anti-colonialism. This trend can be observed in Berlin and Lower Saxony. We face this problem in Saxony-Anhalt as well, though the situation is not as critical here as in these two states.”
No outcome is clean for Halle or Magdeburg’s Jewish communities. An AfD cabinet dominated by the camp around Höcke, who calls remembrance a guilt cult, carries the highest personnel risk. Among mainstream options, a CDU-led government that leans on the left hands real influence to the parties most hostile to Israel. Months of failing to choose is no favor either.
CDU, SPD, the Greens and Die Linke have rejected AfD’s invitation to coalition talks. That is the political boycott of AfD (the brandmauer) on display and holding. BSW has received the invitation and will discuss it in its state board this week; in principle, it’s open to talks with everyone while ruling out any formal coalition.
Sunday did not decide whether Germany ships weapons to Israel. It decided who has the votes, not who gets the keys to the police academy and the history classroom. There is no good choice among them, and the choices are not equal.
