Germany’s Alternative for Germany political party won big in elections Sunday, sweeping 44 percent of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, with the Christian Democratic Union, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, coming in a distant second at 18.5 percent.

“We have made history today,” said Ulrich Siegmund, the lead candidate of the AfD. The possibility remains that the next government will be the most extreme, far-right government in Germany since the Nazi era.

In 2025, Germany’s intelligence service classified the party as right-wing extremist, a classification that allowed intelligence monitoring of the group and that the AfD is challenging in court.

The AfD has run an anti-immigrant, anti-woke, anti-LGBT agenda and is known to be friendly to Moscow. But its rise to power is of grave concern to the Jewish community given its antisemitic tendencies. Its leaders have trivialized the Holocaust, sought to end the concept of remorse for the Holocaust, and engaged in antisemitic tropes.

Björn Höcke, the head of the AfD in the eastern state of Thuringia, said that a Holocaust memorial to murdered Jews was a “memorial of shame” and was convicted by a German court for using a Nazi slogan. Alexander Gauland, the former co-leader of the AfD in the federal parliament, trivialized the rise of Hitler to power and the Holocaust as a “speck of bird s— in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” Wolfgang Gedeon, a former regional AfD lawmaker in Baden-Württemberg, published a book in which he called Judaism the “domestic enemy” of the Christian West. The party failed to expel him.

The American Jewish Committee posted a statement on X expressing its dismay:

“AfD’s election win in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt marks a grim milestone: The party is now within reach of forming Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazi era,” the AJC wrote.

“AJC Berlin has been sounding the alarm on the AfD’s rampant, intrinsic, and foundational antisemitism that is deeply embedded in its authoritarian-nationalist politics. The AfD’s rise remains a threat to German democracy and the future of Europe,” the group added.