AfD presents 100-day plan for Saxony-Anhalt: exit from public broadcasting, deportation blitz, and a push for absolute majority

The 100-day blueprint

At a party congress in Magdeburg's Hyparschale on Saturday, AfD top candidate Ulrich Siegmund presented a 100-day program, pledging that a victory in the September 6 state election would let the party "write history" and "turn the country on its head". The ten-point plan, described by the domestic intelligence agency as the condensed version of a völkisch-authoritarian program, would withdraw Saxony-Anhalt from Germany's interstate broadcasting treaty, sharply expand deportation detention, introduce compulsory work for all asylum seekers, and replace rainbow flags with daily displays of the federal flag in schools. A state campaign rebranding from "#moderndenken" to "#deutschdenken" is also on the list.

People want political change. All the other parties are only occupied with us and have no positions of their own. We are setting the tone.

Polls and the arithmetic of power

An MDR poll in May put the AfD at 41 percent, far ahead of CDU premier Sven Schulze's 26 percent. The current three-party coalition of CDU, SPD and FDP could lose its majority, and the AfD is explicitly aiming for an absolute majority. If that fails, a CDU-led minority government that cooperates on individual votes with the Left party is seen as the only other viable option.

Constitutional red lines

Several proposals face immediate legal obstacles. Withdrawing from the broadcasting treaty triggers a two-year notice period and cannot suspend the constitutional obligation to provide public-service programming. Permanent separate school classes for children of asylum seekers would violate the constitution, according to a legal opinion recently published by the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte. The party's own program acknowledges that broadcast licence fees would not disappear overnight.

A party in lockstep

AfD Saxony-Anhalt, classified by state authorities as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation, used the congress to re-elect its leadership. State chair Martin Reichardt secured 89 percent of delegate votes, his deputies Hans-Thomas Tillschneider and Oliver Kirchner 86 and 90 percent, while new general secretary Tobias Rausch won 80 percent (175 yes, 44 no, 4 abstentions). With around 3,500 members, the branch now sees itself as "a well-oiled high-performance machine".

We are a well-oiled high-performance machine.

Attacks on the CDU

Opening the gathering, Reichardt accused Schulze of lying whenever he rules out cooperation with the Left party. "Without the Left, Mr Schulze has absolutely no chance of any majority," he said, calling the incumbent a figurehead of a "pseudo-conservative government dancing on the strings of left-wing extremists". Preventing that constellation, Reichardt added, was the AfD's historic task.