As expected, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was the big winner in the regional elections held on Sunday 1.Ahem September, in Thuringia and Saxony in the east of the country. It is also not surprising that all three parties in Olaf Scholz’s coalition were severely sanctioned. Ultimately, as expected, the Christian Democrats (CDU) held up fairly well, which, one year before the general elections on 28 September 2025, is a heavy blow for the Social Democratic Chancellor (SPD), who intends to run for a second term.
With 32.8% of the votes, according to the quasi-final results published overnight from Sunday to Monday, the AfD is in first place in Thuringia, where it is up 9.4 points compared to 2019. In Saxony, it has obtained 30.6% of the votes, just 1.3 points less than the CDU (31.9%). In the last election, the order of arrival was the same, but the gap has narrowed: in this region too, the dynamic is on the side of the AfD, which, in five years, has gained 3.1 points and the CDU lost 0.2.
The big losers in this election – marked by a turnout of almost 75%, 8 points more than in 2019 – are the parties of the “traffic light” coalition that has been in power in Berlin since 2021. However, they did not leave any top spots. While Scholz’s SPD limited the damage in Saxony (7.3%, -0.4), in Thuringia it fell by 2.2 points, where it was only 6.1%. With 5.1% of the vote in Saxony (-3.5), the Greens would remain just above the 5% required to be represented in the regional parliament; in contrast, they will no longer have any MPs in Thuringia, where they only got 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 is now expelled from the Thuringian parliament, where it obtains barely 1% of the votes, a score divided by four in five years.
If the AfD is the big winner of these two regional elections, another party has reason to congratulate itself on Sunday’s results: the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Founded in January by this former leader of the left-wing party Die Linke, who is also a member of the Bundestag, this group, which advocates a very generous programme on social issues but is resolutely conservative on social issues, won 11.8% of the votes in Saxony and 15.8% in Thuringia.
Complicated negotiations
The main collateral victim of this dazzling rise is Die Linke. A distant heir to the SED, which ruled the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1989, this party, in deep crisis, has literally collapsed. In Saxony, its 4.5% (-5.9%) does not allow it to continue to be represented in the regional parliament in Dresden. In Thuringia, the only one of the country’s sixteen Länder where it holds the executive, Die Linke has plummeted to 13.1%, i.e. 18 points less than in 2019, despite the popularity of the outgoing Prime Minister, Bodo Ramelow, whose pragmatism was appreciated even by his opponents.
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