The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is on track to win a state election for the first time in the country.
AfD picked up the most votes in the eastern state of Thuringia, according to an exit poll.
The party, founded in 2013 with an anti-migration and eurosceptic agenda, also performed well in Saxony, where it was a close second behind the Conservatives.
About 3.3 million people were eligible to vote in Saxony and nearly 1.7 million in Thuringia.
The results are a blow to the coalition of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz just a year before the federal election in September 2025.
Mr Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) currently governs nationally with the Greens and liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
It is the first time a far-right party looks set to have won the most seats in a German state parliament since the Second World War.
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AfD is unlikely to be able to form a state government as it is short of a majority and other parties refuse to collaborate with it.
AfD is strongest in the formerly communist east, and the domestic intelligence agency has the party’s branches in Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups.
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Immigration was pushed to the top of the country’s political agenda after three people were killed in a knife attack by a suspected Islamic extremist at a festival in Solingen, western Germany, on 23 August.
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On Thursday, AfD’s leader in Thuringia Bjoern Hoecke told a campaign event in Nordhausen: “Our freedoms are being increasingly restricted because people are being allowed into the country who don’t fit in.”
The former history teacher is a polarising figure who has called Berlin’s memorial to Nazi Germany’s Holocaust of Europe’s Jews a “monument of shame”.
He was convicted earlier this year for using a Nazi slogan at a party rally.
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Source : Sky News
