Ulrich Siegmund said the AfD will not put him forward for minister-president in Sachsen-Anhalt unless it can first assemble a stable majority in the new Landtag. After winning the state election without an absolute majority, the party now has to turn a clear victory into enough votes to govern.
Siegmund said the result was a clear mandate, but he also made plain that the AfD had not yet reached the point where it could act alone. He said the party had originally planned to govern by itself, then added that it would now reach out to individual factions or individual members of parliament and use all possibilities to carry out what it sees as its governing task. His goal, he said, was to keep the party’s core positions on migration and internal security fully implemented.
That search for support matters now because government formation in Sachsen-Anhalt has moved into the arithmetic of post-election bargaining. In the third vote in the Magdeburg Landtag, a simple majority is enough to elect a new minister-president, which makes every vote count more than it did during the campaign. The BSW, which won 5.3 percent, said it would abstain in that third round if Siegmund stands for election.
That opening is not the same as a majority. Siegmund said he wanted to give every actor in the Magdeburg Landtag a chance first, but he also drew a line around what he would accept: no games and no compromise that would pull the party away from its own values. He said he wants any arrangement to leave those positions intact and, if possible, to be set out in a fixed agreement with one or another member of parliament.
The friction is obvious. The AfD’s plan had been an Alleinregierung, yet its election result now forces it to look beyond its own ranks if it wants to govern. That makes the next days and weeks decisive, not because a deal is guaranteed, but because the party must prove that its victory can be translated into a working majority before the vote for minister-president is even called.
