AfD prepares governing blueprint for Saxony-Anhalt ahead of September election

On 6 September, voters in Saxony-Anhalt will decide whether the Alternative for Germany becomes the first far-right party to lead a German state government since 1945. Polls place the AfD within a handful of seats of an absolute majority in the Landtag of this eastern state of 2.2 million people. Party strategists have treated the prospect not as a hypothetical but as a project years in the making, complete with a 100-day legislative agenda, a personnel database for the civil service and a legal war room anticipating resistance from Berlin and the courts.

A calculated balance between rupture and routine

The AfD's draft programme for its first hundred days in Magdeburg reads like a manifesto designed to satisfy two contradictory constituencies. On one side are the party's core voters who expect a political revolution: a "deportation task force" combining interior ministry and police powers, a rewrite of school history curricula to reduce emphasis on Nazi crimes, and funding cuts for cultural institutions deemed "anti-German". On the other are the middle-of-the-road Bürger whose acquiescence the party needs to prove that far-right governance need not mean chaos. Hence the inclusion of uncontroversial measures such as increased funding for volunteer fire brigades covering motorway stretches.

Ulrich Siegmund, the 36-year-old former fragrance salesman who would become minister-president, embodies this duality. At a rally in Merseburg he told thousands of supporters they were "making history right now" and that future generations would date the AfD's national breakthrough to 2026 in Saxony-Anhalt. His celebrity-style appeal, selfies, quick smiles, packed halls, sits alongside the domestic intelligence designation of his state branch as a proven extremist organisation, a label that includes former members of a banned group modelled on the Hitler Youth.

The Black-Red-Gold Academy and the remaking of the administration

The most concrete expression of the AfD's governing preparation is the Black-Red-Gold Academy, established in 2025 and named for the national flag's colours. Its purpose: to identify, vet and train up to 200 party loyalists willing to relocate to Magdeburg and occupy key positions in the state civil service, particularly in the interior and finance ministries. Candidates have been sourced from across Germany; some have undergone specialised training in Berlin.

In postwar Germany, the civil service is constitutionally required to be politically neutral. Incoming governments routinely replace a handful of political appointees, state secretaries, department heads, but the scale contemplated here is without precedent. Andreas Lichert, an AfD Bundestag deputy from Hesse familiar with the national planning, described it as a "restructuring process". Since career civil servants cannot be dismissed, the method is to sideline them: "By allocating resources appropriately, you can ensure they, to put it bluntly, can no longer cause any harm."

The strategy reflects a lesson the AfD has absorbed from its Austrian sister party, the Freedom Party (FPÖ). The FPÖ has participated in national governments since the 1980s and currently governs in five of Austria's nine states. In early 2026, a delegation from Saxony-Anhalt including Siegmund travelled to Salzburg for tutorials on managing a state bureaucracy. In April, FPÖ veteran Hubert Fuchs, a former state secretary in Vienna's finance ministry, briefed AfD candidates from three states holding September elections on practical governance and, crucially, on how to persuade other parties to enter coalition with the far right.

Vienna's playbook: normalisation through competence

The Austrian example matters because the FPÖ succeeded in shedding its pariah status not by moderating its ideology but by demonstrating administrative competence. When the FPÖ entered government in 2000, the EU imposed diplomatic sanctions; by 2017, those sanctions were a memory and the party was a routine coalition partner. AfD strategists believe the same trajectory is available in Germany if they can govern a state without visible dysfunction. Götz Frömming, who oversees the party's federal election programming, put it plainly: if Saxony-Anhalt works, "citizens will naturally see that the world won't come to an end, but that things might even get better," eroding the hesitation that keeps many voters from backing the AfD nationally.

This calculation explains the party's emphasis on avoiding the images of chaos that accompanied US immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration. Gordon Köhler, who attended the Salzburg meetings, acknowledged a "tension" between swift action and governing well. "We won't reach everyone," he said, "but the point is for things to be a bit less tense and not as highly emotional as they are right now. A society must function somehow."

The CDU's firewall holds, for now

Sven Schulze, the incumbent CDU minister-president, has ruled out any coalition with the AfD. He describes the party's civil service plans as a "sham" that would create costly new posts while subjecting teachers, school principals and mid-level officials to harassment and constructive dismissal. "Everyone who doesn't even come close to doing what the AfD dictates will have to fear for their job," Schulze warned. He also dismissed Siegmund as a "puppet" of federal party co-leader Alice Weidel, accusing the national leadership of using Saxony-Anhalt as a launchpad for Berlin.

The CDU's refusal matters arithmetically. Even if the AfD wins the most seats, an absolute majority is far from guaranteed. Without coalition partners, the party would govern as a minority administration, dependent on case-by-case support for every legislative act. That fragility is precisely what the AfD's legal preparations aim to mitigate.

Federal leverage: intelligence sharing and fiscal equalisation

In Berlin, mainstream parties are exploring two levers to constrain an AfD-led state government. The first concerns the conference of interior ministers, where sensitive intelligence, particularly on Russian operations, is shared among federal and state officials. Given the AfD's documented Moscow-friendly positions, national leaders are considering excluding a Saxony-Anhalt interior minister from those sessions. The second lever is financial: Saxony-Anhalt received €2.8 billion in 2025 through the federal fiscal equalisation system that redistributes revenue from richer to poorer states. Theoretically, payments could be reduced for rule-of-law violations, though the legal thresholds are high.

The AfD has anticipated both. A federal "Working Group on Government Participation" has drafted legislation for the state parliament and prepared legal counters to obstruction attempts. Martin Reichardt, the Saxony-Anhalt branch leader, confirmed the party's legal department has modelled scenarios in which political opponents use courts to block executive action. "We will defend ourselves against this through appropriate legal means," he said.

The legal battlefield is already drawn

Several items in the 100-day programme are certain to face immediate constitutional challenge. Mass detention of asylum seekers will collide with European and German court rulings on proportionality and human dignity. Defunding public broadcasters touches the guarantee of media independence. Curriculum changes that minimise Nazi-era history risk violating the Basic Law's educational mandates. The AfD's lawyers have reportedly drafted fallback provisions designed to survive partial strike-downs by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.

The party's calculation is that even partial implementation, sustained over a full legislative term, creates facts on the ground. A deportation task force that operates for six months before a court ruling, a cohort of loyalist officials embedded in ministries, a generation of pupils taught a revised history, these are not easily reversed by a successor government. The FPÖ's Austrian trajectory suggests that normalisation is less about surviving every court case than about surviving politically long enough to become routine.

What happens after 6 September