An exit poll from Sunday's regional election in Saxony-Anhalt suggests the hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won 44.5 per cent of the vote, putting it on course to lead a German state parliament for the first time since the Nazi era. The projected result has alarmed politicians in Berlin and Brussels, with the AfD, led locally by 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, campaigning on deporting illegal migrants, closing the border, banning LGBTQ pride flags in schools and halting new wind farm construction. The party has drawn support in the former East German state by tapping into nostalgia for the communist era and resentment over the enduring wealth gap with western Germany.

The result is a heavy blow to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose Christian Democratic Union (CDU) saw its vote share collapse from 36 per cent four years ago to just 18 per cent, leaving his leadership increasingly vulnerable. Merz is expected to withhold state funding from Saxony-Anhalt and maintain a "firewall" barring AfD politicians from sensitive intelligence briefings over unproven allegations of Russian links, working with Left-wing parties to do so. The AfD's surge is widely linked to public anger over immigration, with some 15 million migrants entering Germany since 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the border to those fleeing the Syrian civil war, a policy critics blame for a rise in crime, including sexual assaults. Thousands protested against the AfD's rise at a rally in the regional capital, Magdeburg, on Saturday.