The AfD missed its election target in Saxony-Anhalt.

There she wanted to become the strongest force in a country for the first time.

But according to initial forecasts, the party ends up lagging behind the CDU by a long way.

The AfD then comes to 22.5 to 23.5 percent, the gap to the Union is around ten percentage points.

In the 2016 election, the AfD had reached 24.3 percent at the height of the refugee crisis.

This time she missed this result.

Co-party leader Tino Chrupalla speaks of a "very good result" in the evening.

The country voted “bourgeois-conservative”, the citizens “want a government made up of CDU and AfD,” says Chrupalla, interpreting the result in his own way.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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    The election campaign, and especially its final spurt, revolved primarily around the AfD. While the SPD, the Greens and the Left accused the CDU of not setting themselves apart from the AfD enough, the CDU insisted that only one vote for the Union would prevent the AfD from becoming the strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt. If you want to prevent the AfD, you have to choose CDU Prime Minister Reiner Haseloff, said General Secretary Paul Ziemiak. His SPD colleague Lars Klingbeil admitted that Haseloff credibly embodied the demarcation from the AfD. But in the second row of the CDU it looks very different.

    In fact, two CDU members, including the vice-parliamentary leader, had already wanted to reconcile the “national” with the “social”, as they put it in a 2019 memorandum.

    And in the refusal to increase the radio license fee, the CDU and AfD had long taken the same position, so that the black-red-green coalition in Magdeburg was on the verge of collapse.

    Most recently, the statements by the Eastern Commissioner and CDU MP Marco Wanderwitz that a large part of the East Germans who voted for right-wing extremists had been lost to democracy through their “dictatorship socialization” had fueled fears that the AfD would gain even more popularity.

    But that was obviously not the case to a decisive extent.

    Staff of the regional association hardly known

    Although the party does not have Björn Höcke in Saxony-Anhalt, its staff is hardly known. This is precisely where the regional association is typical of the East AfD. In its stance against the establishment and as a party of the discontented and angry, the party has established itself in East Germany. It gathers a constituency that does not allow itself to be deterred by right-wing extremist statements because it calls liberal democracy into question anyway. The fact that the regional association, which has fewer than 1,500 members, is divided has not changed the high level of approval.

    The former state and parliamentary group chairman André Poggenburg, once a close friend of Höcke's, has long since left the party, and three members of the parliamentary group have resigned. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution classifies the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt as a suspected right-wing extremist case, and intelligence services can also be used against them - for example tapping into phone calls or using informants.

    In terms of federal politics, there had been speculation on a success in Saxony-Anhalt, which should give the party a boost. Because in the federal government, where it was last in the polls at eleven to twelve percent, nothing has moved up for the AfD for a long time. The stronger the AfD would have become in Saxony-Anhalt, the greater the success would have been for the radical, “ethnic” part of the AfD, which was organized in the “wing” and dominated in the East German AfD. If the party becomes the strongest force, this is a "historic sign", right-wing frontman Höcke had already said during the election campaign. That has not happened now.

    For the moderates around co-party leader Meuthen, another defeat has been averted. At the federal party conference in Dresden in April, Meuthen himself described the maximum election target as follows: “If we do it right this time, we have a great chance at this election to become the strongest political force in a federal state for the first time and even with some distance . "

    But this announcement also means that a failure of this scenario for Meuthen and the moderates could be a template to question the radical course of the East AfD. Most recently, Meuthen had to suffer a bitter defeat when his Saxon co-party leader Tino Chrupalla and his long-time intimate enemy Alice Weidel were elected with more than 70 percent in a membership decision, while Meuthen's favorites, the Hessian MP Joana Cotar and the former Air Force General Joachim Wundrak, had only received 27 percent. The defeat was so clear that the Meuthen camp had to rally first.

    How much the power struggle in the federal party affects the entire AfD was shown at the end of the election campaign. While top candidate Oliver Kirchner and party leader Chrupalla gathered 250 spectators on Magdeburger Domplatz, the supporters of Meuthen held their own event in a suburb with MP Kay Gottschalk and members of the federal executive board, in which Meuthen still has a majority.

    It is unlikely that the power struggle in the AfD will escalate before the general election. Because each side would have to be accused of having destroyed the unity necessary in the election campaign. But after the election, the moderates, who come from the numerically much stronger western regional associations, could have a say in the election of the parliamentary group leadership, for example trying to prevent the election of Chrupalla and Weidel as parliamentary group leaders. However, if the AfD, which gave itself a sharply right-wing election manifesto in April, surpassed its old mark of 12.6 percent, the far-right could record that as a success. Then the more moderate party leader Meuthen would also be likely to be voted out, if he runs again at all.