AFD Wins Saxony-Anhalt and Demands Dismantling of Germany's Energy Transition
The party's first opportunity to govern a German state puts wind and solar permitting directly in its sights while reviving Nord Stream calls.
Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party took 43.8% of the vote in Sunday's (2026-09-06) Saxony-Anhalt state election, preliminary results showed, more than doubling its share from four years earlier and positioning it to govern a German state for the first time.7
Lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund was unambiguous on election night (2026-09-06). Germany's energy policy was "crazy," he said, and the AFD would seek a coalition partner to change it.7
The practical scope of that ambition depends on whoever sits across the negotiating table. State governments in Germany do not write federal energy law, but they control permitting — for wind turbines, solar arrays, grid connections and planning approvals. Saxony-Anhalt's renewables sector had spent months bracing for this outcome; Montel reported that Germany's green energy firms had been debating how to handle an AFD-led administration even before polling day.6
The CDU, which governed Saxony-Anhalt under incumbent minister-president Sven Schulze and was polling around 23% ahead of the vote, now faces coalition arithmetic with few obvious routes around the AFD. Mainstream German politics has maintained a formal agreement not to govern with the far-right party. With the AFD holding more than 40% of seats, that position becomes harder to sustain. The domestic intelligence service has partially classified the party as right-wing extremist.6,4
The AFD's energy programme goes further than skepticism about the Energiewende. The party denies human-caused climate change and wants to scrap Germany's energy transition outright.6 That stance carries a visible geopolitical extension. In June 2026, Markus Frohnmaier, the AFD's parliamentary foreign policy spokesman, met Kirill Dmitriev, one of Vladimir Putin's senior advisers, and separately held talks with Alexei Miller, chief executive of Gazprom, Reuters reported. Frohnmaier called for a resumption of Nord Stream gas flows.2,3
The pipelines are not simply rhetorical props. One strand of Nord Stream 2 remains intact and technically operable, according to analysis published by War on the Rocks on September 2 (2026-09-02), though the same piece judged that mustering the political will to restart it would be extremely difficult for any German government.5 ICE Endex TTF front-month held at €82.22/MWh in early European trade on Friday (2026-09-11), flat on the session. European storage is well-supplied, and there is no visible market pricing for a pipeline revival.
Germany's memory of what happens when Russian gas disappears is still raw. The 2022 energy crisis triggered a €200 billion bailout of energy companies and consumers — one of the largest peacetime fiscal interventions in German history.5 That figure complicates any argument that re-engaging with Gazprom would deliver straightforward relief for German energy bills.
The federal backdrop makes this harder for Chancellor Friedrich Merz to navigate. His CDU/CSU coalition won last year's federal election with 29% of the vote; it had slid to 23% in polls, according to Economist reporting from May 17 (2026-05-17). The SPD, his junior coalition partner, languishes at 13%. Merz's personal approval is worse still: just 13% of Germans say they are satisfied with his work, and only 11% think his government is performing well.1 A weakened federal government carries less authority in pressuring a state-level AFD administration and less credibility defending the energy transition as an affordable policy.
For the renewables industry, the concern is immediate. Wind and solar developers in Saxony-Anhalt now face a planning environment that may turn openly hostile. Germany's clean-energy build-out can absorb delays in individual states, but eastern Germany has strong wind resources; permits stalled in Saxony-Anhalt compound a national grid-expansion backlog the industry already treats as a serious constraint. Montel noted the sector had been monitoring this risk for months.6
Until the CDU signals its position on a coalition partner, developers in Saxony-Anhalt have no basis for planning decisions on projects that could face hostile permitting under an AFD-led government. If the cordon breaks even selectively, AFD energy demands acquire a template that other eastern states could follow.4