Roughly two months before the Saxony-Anhalt state election, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has reaffirmed its ambition to take control of the regional government. Speaking at a party conference in Magdeburg on Saturday, state chairman Martin Reichardt declared that after the September 6 election, the AfD would "hold the governing majority," adding bluntly: "The goal is the State Chancellery."
Top candidate Ulrich Siegmund used the conference to present a ten-point, hundred-day program of immediate measures the party intends to implement if it takes power. He described the task ahead as an effort to "turn the wheel around to create the historic sensation," and accused rival parties of trying to "throw sand in the AfD's gears" out of "panicked fear" of an AfD-led government.
Siegmund's ten-point, hundred-day plan sets out the specific actions an AfD-led Saxony-Anhalt government would carry out immediately after taking office, within its first 100 days, not the party's full governing agenda, which was already adopted separately in April.
According to Siegmund, the specific immediate measures include:
Alongside the immediate package, Siegmund also pointed to aims he described as longer-term rather than part of the 100-day plan itself. These include reshaping school history curricula, which he argued focus too heavily on Germany's Nazi-era guilt, and defending what he called a traditional family model of "a man, a woman, and children from that couple."
Siegmund framed the overall package, both the immediate measures and the longer-term aims, as part of a broader vision to "put this country back on its feet."
The AfD currently holds a substantial lead over the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) in state polling. A May survey conducted for the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) put the AfD at 41 percent, compared with 26 percent for the CDU under Minister President Sven Schulze, who currently leads a coalition of the CDU, SPD, and FDP.
The same poll placed the Left Party (Die Linke) at 12 percent, the SPD at 7 percent, and both the Greens and the BSW at 4 percent each, the latter two falling short of the threshold needed to enter parliament. The FDP's support was too low to be reported separately. Even with these numbers, the AfD would fall short of an absolute majority. However, since the CDU has ruled out any coalition with the Left Party, the only alternative to an AfD-led government would be a CDU-SPD minority administration.
At the same party conference, delegates reconfirmed Martin Reichardt as state chairman with around 89 percent support. Reichardt, who was born in Goslar in Lower Saxony, has led the party's Saxony-Anhalt branch since 2018 and has served as a Bundestag member for the AfD since 2017.
Reichardt was recently at the center of controversy after a photograph surfaced showing him with his left arm raised. According to the Politico podcast "Inside AfD," which published the image, Reichardt allegedly performed a Hitler salute in 2020 in the presence of party colleagues, an allegation he has denied. The AfD's state branch described the gesture as a "humorous knighting" connected to an induction ritual at a private party.
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