AfD representative Tobias Rausch has been elected as the president of the State Parliament of Saxony-Anhalt during the inaugural session. This marks the first time the AfD has secured the position of a state parliament president.
Rausch won the secret ballot on Tuesday, receiving 48 votes out of 82 cast. The AfD holds 39 seats in the parliament, and the BSW, which had previously announced its support for Rausch, holds 5 seats, meaning a combined total of 44 votes secured the victory.
Eva von Angern, the leading candidate of the Left Party, who opened the inaugural session as the presiding president, had recently criticized Rausch’s apparent success by comparing it to National Socialism. Angern argued that the first president of a parliament coming from a right-wing extremist party should not be someone like Hermann Göring. The SPD echoed this sentiment almost verbatim on Instagram, stating: “The first right-wing extremist parliament president since Hermann Göring? Not with us!” Göring served as the Reichstag president from 1932 to 1945.
The AfD emerged clearly as the strongest political force in the state parliamentary election on September 6, securing 43.8 percent of the vote, although they narrowly missed achieving an absolute majority in the parliament. Note that the state chapter of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is classified by the domestic security services as a “secure right-wing extremist aspiration.”
