The Alternative für Deutschland achieved almost 44% of the vote in Sunday’s election in Saxony-Anhalt, a result that has left Maryam fearing for her family’s future in Germany. For the teenager from Wolmirstedt, the number is not abstract: it lands on a family that renews its residency permits every three years and now worries about what comes next.
“Don’t laugh at me, but I wish we could go back to the days of Angela Merkel, when things were OK in Germany,” Maryam said while walking through Magdeburg. She said her father came to Germany from Syria in 2015 and that she and her mother joined him two years later. “It’s on my mind constantly,” she said.
Maryam in Magdeburg
Maryam said the AfD’s 100-day programme, which says the party will deport people it deems irregular migrants from the first moment of being in power, made the vote feel immediate at home. “We have to renew our residency permits every three years as it is,” she said. “Now after these election results we face going back to Syria which we don’t think is safe, and I can’t even read or write Arabic.”
The result is being read in Saxony-Anhalt as a historic high, and that is why the reaction in Magdeburg is sharper than a routine election disappointment. For immigrant families, the question is not simply who won the most votes; it is whether a large share can translate into real pressure on people whose status already depends on regular renewal.
Doreen backs the blues
Doreen, a cleaner, backed what she termed the blues “out of a sense of desperation” and said she hoped the winners would “straighten up a few things right away.” When challenged about the human impact on immigrant families, she answered: “It is what it is.”
She went further, saying: “If they [refugees] hadn’t turned up here in such large numbers in the first place, they wouldn’t have to go through such heart-breaking situations now.” She also said she hoped the party would act on promises to end refugee status for Ukrainians and aid to Kyiv, adding: “They [Ukrainians] come here in their fancy cars, pretending they’re escaping devastation, but most of them have far more resources and designer clothes than I do.”
Judith and Ernst in Magdeburg
Judith and Ernst said they voted for Die Linke after their daily stroll to the Elbe river. “It’s not like we didn’t see it coming,” Judith said. “But we don’t quite know what to do with the information. The reality of it hasn’t quite kicked in.”
That split matters because the vote did not land on a single emotional line. Maryam saw a threat to residency and family stability, Doreen saw a chance for hard policy changes, and Judith and Ernst described a result they had expected but had not yet processed. How the Alternative für Deutschland would turn almost 44% of the vote into governing power in Saxony-Anhalt is not explained.
Mark Derosa breakdown sits alongside this result in a very different sports context, but the contrast is useful: one story is about performance turning into measurable output, the other about a vote share that may or may not become power. In Saxony-Anhalt, that conversion is the part everyone is now watching.
