A TikTok Star Led the Far Right to Its First Win in a German State
On Sunday, the anti-migration Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to finish first in a German state election since World War II, taking 43.8% in Saxony-Anhalt behind a 35-year-old lead candidate with more than 700,000 TikTok followers. The result capped a campaign built for the feed — and left every other party refusing to govern with a group Germany’s domestic intelligence has flagged as extremist.
The Alternative for Germany finished first in Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt, the first time a far-right party has topped a German state vote since World War II. The party won 43.8% of the vote, more than double the 20.8% it took in the eastern state in 2021, according to preliminary official figures reported by NPR and Al Jazeera.
The result fell just short of the absolute majority the AfD had sought. It took 39 of the 83 seats in the state legislature, three fewer than the 42 needed to govern alone, CBS News reported, and every other party has ruled out forming a coalition with it — the cross-party “firewall” that has kept the AfD out of power. The incumbent Christian Democrats, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, collapsed to 17.2%, Al Jazeera reported.
A candidate built for the feed
At the center of the campaign was Ulrich Siegmund, a 35-year-old former marketing executive whom Al Jazeera described as a TikTok star in his own right. In a state of about 2.1 million people, his TikTok account has more than 700,000 followers, and he answers voters’ questions in short clips filmed, the network reported, from his back porch.
Young voters have driven that surge. The AfD’s strongest recent gains have come among voters aged 18 to 25, roughly tripling its 2021 national-election result in that group, Al Jazeera reported. Siegmund, cast by the outlet as the “friendly face” of the AfD, paired that upbeat style with a hard platform, promising a “remigration and deportation offensive” targeting undocumented migrants from his first day in office. “We have made history in this state,” he said Sunday, according to Al Jazeera.
The party the feed carried
The AfD’s dominance of platforms such as TikTok is not new. As early as 2024, NPR documented how the party was using the app — with short, emotive videos heavy on migration and crime — to reach young and immigrant voters, outpacing Germany’s mainstream parties on the platform.
Its online rise has run parallel to official alarm about the party itself. In May 2025, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, classified the AfD as a right-wing extremist organization on the basis of a 1,100-page report that found it racist and anti-Muslim, a step that let authorities monitor it more closely, NPR reported. The agency suspended the label while the party challenges it in court and continues to list the AfD as a “suspected” extremist case.
A test that will repeat
Saxony-Anhalt is the first of several regional elections in Germany this autumn, NPR reported, and the result sharpens a debate that has followed the AfD’s climb: how far platforms that reward the most emotive, shareable content have helped a party once confined to the fringe reach the center of power. Researchers who study the AfD’s social-media operation caution that a correlation between heavy TikTok use and AfD support does not by itself prove the platform changed how people voted.
What is not in dispute is the scale of the party’s online reach and the direction of its politics. On Sunday, for the first time, both carried it to first place in a German state.