Unsurprisingly, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was the big winner of the regional elections held on Sunday, 1is September, in Thuringia and Saxony, in the east of the country. Also unsurprisingly, the three parties in Olaf Scholz’s coalition were severely punished. Finally, unsurprisingly, the Christian Democrats (CDU) held up rather well, which, one year before the legislative elections of September 28, 2025, is a serious blow for the Social Democratic Chancellor (SPD), who intends to run for a second term.
With 32.8% of the vote, according to the almost final results published on the night of Sunday to Monday, the AfD came out on top in Thuringia, where it gained 9.4 points compared to 2019. In Saxony, it won 30.6% of the vote, only 1.3 points less than the CDU (31.9%). In the last elections, the order of arrival was the same, but the gap has narrowed: in this region too, the momentum is on the side of the AfD, which, in five years, has gained 3.1 points while the CDU has lost 0.2.
The big losers in these elections – marked by a turnout of almost 75%, up 8 points compared to those of 2019 – are the parties of the “traffic light” coalition in power in Berlin since 2021. However, they did not start from a high point. While Mr Scholz’s SPD limited the damage in Saxony (7.3%, -0.4), it fell by 2.2 points in Thuringia, where it landed at just 6.1%. With 5.1% of the vote in Saxony (-3.5), the Greens would remain just above the 5% mark necessary to be represented in the regional parliament; on the other hand, they will no longer have any MPs in Thuringia, where they only received 3.2% (-2). As for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), its debacle is even more bitter: already absent from the Saxon parliament since 2014, it has this time been ousted from that of Thuringia, where it obtained barely 1% of the votes, a score divided by four in five years.
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While the AfD is the big winner of these two regional elections, another party has reason to be pleased with Sunday’s results: the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Founded in January by this former leader of the left-wing party Die Linke, who is also a member of the Bundestag, this party, which defends a very generous programme on the social level, but resolutely conservative on societal issues, won 11.8% of the vote in Saxony and 15.8% in Thuringia.
Complicated negotiations
The main collateral victim of this meteoric rise is Die Linke. A distant heir to the SED, which led the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1989, this party in deep crisis is literally collapsing. In Saxony, its 4.5% (-5.9) does not allow it to remain represented in the regional parliament of Dresden. In Thuringia, the only one of the sixteen Länder of the country where it held the executive, Die Linke plummeted to 13.1%, or 18 points less than in 2019, despite the popularity of the outgoing minister-president, Bodo Ramelow, whose pragmatism was appreciated even by his opponents.
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