Germany – AfD party

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) won the Saxony-Anhalt state election by a wide margin but fell short of an absolute majority. Nevertheless, the party may still come to power if it can garner enough support from BSW or peel off a few MPs from rival parties. This possibility has thrust an unused and radical clause of the German constitution, federal coercion or “Bundeszwang,” to the center of a fight over how far Berlin can go if the right-wing party takes power.

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is known for its strength in the east of the country, but its popularity in Western Germany is also only growing, including in the country’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Spooked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the German military drafted a 1,000-page blueprint in 2024 to set out how to respond to another Russian attack in Eastern Europe. Senior leaders in Germany’s 16 states are among the few government officials allowed access to the classified document, known informally as an “Oplan.”

Now, Germany’s federal government, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, is preparing to restrict that access, in order to prevent a far-right, Moscow-friendly party — which won a recent election in the small eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt — from reviewing the plan.

‘There can be no sugar-coating these results’, conceded German chancellor Friedrich Merz last night, following a historic, humiliating defeat for his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the regional elections. ‘It is a disaster.’

Friedrich Merz is fighting for his political survival after his Christian Democrats (CDU) party suffered stinging defeats in two key elections.

Exit polls for the state elections, in Berlin and in the eastern state of Mecklenburg Vorpommern, both showed the CDU trailing far behind the hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD surged with 37 per cent of the vote and the CDU secured only 5.5 per cent, the exit polls showed, by far the latter party’s worst ever performance in an election. The AfD is unlikely to take power, however, without a majority.

A publicly owned hospital in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has fired a pediatric surgeon without notice after she ran unsuccessfully for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a neighboring state’s local elections.

Dr. Svetlana Spirina, a senior physician in pediatric surgery at Klinikum Lippe in Detmold, appeared on the AfD ticket for Osnabrück’s city council in Lower Saxony’s Sept. 13 vote. While she did not win a seat, the hospital, owned solely by the Lippe district, then dismissed her immediately, the clinic confirmed.

The regional leader of the pro-border-control AfD party said his faction was “the clear winner of the evening” after the legacy centrist-globalist Christian Conservatives and Social Democrats recorded their worst results ever in Lower Saxony.

Provisional results show support for the sovereigntist, Eurosceptic, border-control Alternative for Germany (AfD) tripled in Sunday’s Lower Saxony elections to select hundreds of directly-elected mayors and other representatives.

Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) has filed a criminal complaint against Chancellor Friedrich Merz over remarks he made in the Bundestag on September 9.

In the budget debate Merz said the party’s “remigration” slogan was “nothing other than a synonym for ethnic cleansing based on origin and skin colour”.

The AfD parliamentary group says that is a defamatory insult.

A political earthquake would be too weak a description of the shock caused by last Sunday’s election in the small German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The governing Christian Democrats (CDU) won a measly 17.2 per cent – down nearly 20 points from the previous election – while the right-populist AfD came out on top with 43.8 per cent.