Unsurprisingly, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was the big winner in the regional elections held in Thuringia and Saxony, in the east of the country, on Sunday, September 1. Just as unsurprisingly, the three parties that comprise Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition were severely penalized. Finally, and yet again, unsurprisingly, the Christian Democrats (CDU) party held up rather well, which, one year ahead of Germany's general elections, to be held on September 28, 2025, is a serious blow for the Social Democratic (SPD) Chancellor, who intends to run for a second term in office.
With 32.8% of the vote, according to near-definitive results published on Sunday night, the AfD took the lead in Thuringia, a region in which it has progressed 9.4 points since 2019. In Saxony, it garnered 30.6% of the vote, just 1.3 points behind the CDU (31.9%). At the last election, the parties' scores were in the same order, but the gap between them has narrowed: In this region, too, the momentum was on the AfD's side, as over five years the party has progressed 3.1 points, while the CDU has dropped 0.2%.
The biggest losers in these elections – which saw a turnout of almost 75%, up 8 points over 2019 – were the parties comprising the "traffic light" coalition that has held power in Berlin since 2021. Moreover, they weren't in a good position to start with. While Scholz's SPD limited its losses in Saxony (7.3%, down 0.4%), it fell by 2.2 points in Thuringia, where it wound up scoring just 6.1%. Meanwhile, with 5.1% of the vote in Saxony (down 3.5 points), the Greens seemed to have stabilized just above the 5% threshold needed for representation in the regional parliament; by contrast, they were set to no longer have any seats in Thuringia, where they garnered just 3.2% of the vote (down 2 points). As for the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), its debacle was even more painful: It had already been absent from the Saxon parliament since 2014, and this time it was ousted from the Thuringian one, as it barely obtained 1% of that state's vote, just a quarter of its score from five years before.
While the AfD was the main winner of these two regional elections, another party has good reason to be pleased with Sunday's results: The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). Founded in January by Wagenknecht, a former left-wing Die Linke party leader and sitting member of the Bundestag, this party, which advocates a program that is very generous on the welfare front but resolutely conservative on social issues, garnered 11.8% of the vote in Saxony and 15.8% in Thuringia.
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