Bad election for CDU
Terrible election for SPD

CDU either have to move back to the right to counter AfD, or they have to eat one of the centrist parties because there's no longer room for all of them. SPD really are ripe for consumption there.

Mir ist egal. Anyway what do we make of the rise of the AfD? Are they just ticked off CDU voters or will they have staying power?

SPD won Rhineland Palatinate though?

du hast

SPD kept RP, yes, but that really papers over the cracks of just how awful its results were elsewhere. It barely got over 10% in SA - pretty much halved in votes. AfD supporters are clearly not just coming from CDU - they're from SPD, and going by SA, they're even jumping for Die Linke. They're not just one pissed off fracture group, so I think they're going to stay for a while.

My impression is that the AfD is not merely, and only very minorly supported by, ticked off CDU voters; but is rather the product of a whole class of voters who have not voted previously because their far-right ideologies and dog-whistle politics were not being represented by the mainstream parties.

Saxony-Anhalt is poor and it's unsurprising that the AfD was able to drumbeat poor, disgruntled working-class voters to the polling booths on plain-speaking messages that are easy to listen to: migrants taking the jobs you don't have, the benefits you don't get, destroying the communities you've barely kept together since the Mauerfall.

This was also the highest voter turnout for Saxony-Anhalt, with a lot more new voters than any previous election this shows that the AfD is not simply taking from other parties but it's largely a new voting group. More than likely some voting demographics stayed away, and didn't vote for the coalition parties, otherwise the turnout would have been higher.

Yes it seems like the establishment parties have always been weak in S-A so AfD rising to second place shouldn't be a huge surprise. I was disappointed Die Linke didn't do better there. I am flummoxed that a conservative state like B-W has a Green ruling party though. It seems that more Germans support the refugee policy than oppose it.