Hours before the polling stations in Saxony-Anhalt close on Sunday, information about the election results spreads, initial tendencies that are becoming more precise and stabilizing.

Each additional one that is added should have improved the mood in the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus in Berlin.

The CDU, under the leadership of Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff, was clear early on as the clear winner.

So far are the Christian Democrats in the East German state ahead of the runner-up, the AfD, that doubts about success soon no longer seem appropriate.

Eckart Lohse

Head of the parliamentary editorial office in Berlin.

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    Just a few minutes after the polling stations closed at 6:03 p.m., CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak made his first public comment.

    “Today is a good day,” he says on ZDF.

    He calls the result of the CDU "sensationally good".

    He immediately tried to use the roaring success in Saxony-Anhalt for the federal party.

    Not only does he speak of the greatest growth for the CDU since the previous election in North Rhine-Westphalia, where he himself, but above all the party chairman and chancellor candidate Armin Laschet, comes from.

    Haseloff's and Laschet's joint election campaign also showed how unity pays off for the CDU.

    It continues like this when Ziemiak steps in to the microphone shortly afterwards in the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus.

    The general secretary is relieved and happy about the good performance of the CDU.

    Again and again he not only mentions Haseloff, but Laschet at the same time.

    The result in Saxony-Anhalt shows that the CDU could win with a "clear course and as a team".

    No other Thuringia

    Ziemiak recalls polls that the CDU would have seen behind the AfD. This is supposed to make the success of the Christian Democrats seem even greater. In fact, the question of whether the AfD manages to do better than the CDU had hung like a dark cloud over the election campaign and the election on Sunday. After all, the polls indicated long before Sunday that a situation like the one that occurred in Thuringia in February of last year did not have to be feared at the CDU headquarters in Berlin. In Thuringia, the AfD not only stood in front of the CDU in the end, but the parties on the far left and the far right together achieved well over 50 percent of the votes, so that the CDU had no chance of forming a coalition without the AfD and the Left Party. To date there has been no stable formation of a government,On the day of the federal election, the voters in Thuringia should vote again on the composition of the state parliament.

    On the way to the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, a big question arose: what course will the Union be taking to maintain its position as Chancellor in the federal elections in September? And with which staff? Saxony-Anhalt seems like a laboratory in which these questions are played out. On Sunday evening, Ziemiak said several times that the victory was due to a course in the middle. Prime Minister Haseloff did not for a moment cast doubt that any form of cooperation with the AfD was ruled out for him. He is thus in a clean line with the leadership of the federal party, above all Chairman Laschet. After Ziemiak made a statement on Sunday evening, Friedrich Merz spoke up, who had lost to Laschet in the struggle for party leadership, but has been loyally at his side since then.He also drew a sharp line with the AfD.