Trump hails 'really big night' for populists in German election after historic victory
President Donald Trump heralded the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's electoral success in regional elections on Sunday in a Tuesday night post on Truth Social.
"Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night," Trump wrote in the post.
"They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly. THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore! MGGA!!! President DJT," his post concluded.
The German state of Saxony-Anhalt held elections Sunday, and AfD outperformed expectations that predicted the party would secure 40-41% of the vote, according to The Guardian.
AfD surpassed that, garnering 43.8% of the vote while securing 39 seats in the state's 83-member parliament, according to results from the state's election authority.
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It's a marked improvement from the young party's last result in the state, as AfD secured only 20% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt's 2021 elections.
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The anti-immigration party benefited in particular from the Christian Democratic Union of Germany's (CDU) losses, as Saxony-Anhalt's previous governing party dropped 25 seats, ending the election with only 15 seats in the state's parliament, per the results from the election authority.
AfD's parliamentary co-chair in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, credited his party's victory to Germany's unpopular Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a member of the CDU party.
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"Things cannot carry on like this," Siegmund told state broadcaster ARD, adding that "a very good campaigner for us in this election campaign was Friedrich Merz."
Merz's CDU, like other parties in Germany, refuses to work with AfD, whose Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified as an "extremist group" by Germany's internal intelligence service.
AfD has been met with complete opposition in Germany, with most parties putting up what leaders and German media have come to categorize as a "firewall" against working with them. The CDU and three other parties that won seats in Saxony-Anhalt's Sunday elections – the Left Party, the Social Democrats, and the Greens – have already publicly stated they will not form a coalition with AfD in the state.
Without an absolute majority, it's unclear how AfD would be able to rule without the cooperation of another party. The party's best hope of forming a ruling coalition would be with the only other party that won seats in Sunday's election, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which took five parliamentary seats.
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The state's incumbent governor, Sven Schulze, a member of the CDU, congratulated AfD for its victory, and said, "We as the CDU will also have to deal with this result." But his party's national general secretary, Franziska Hoppermann, remained defiant.
"AfD is a right-wing extremist party. It wants to leave the euro; that would be economic downfall... it works closely together with Russia, it wants a completely different social model," she said, according to The Associated Press. "We will not work with them."
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AfD's defacto leader, Alice Weidel, meanwhile, celebrated the result as "sensational," adding that the party’s "hand is outstretched to all who want to make Saxony-Anhalt better and move Germany forward."
Fox News Digital contacted the AfD and the CDU for further comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.