Germany is two days from a vote that could hand a party once relegated to the political fringe its first outright control of a state government since the end of World War II. Polling released this week shows the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) commanding more than 40 percent of the vote ahead of Sunday's election in Saxony-Anhalt, according to NPR — nearly double the support of its nearest rival.

The AfD's lead candidate, 35-year-old Ulrich Siegmund, has led the party's group in the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag since 2016 and has built a TikTok following that dwarfs those of his mainstream rivals; Der Spiegel has dubbed him "Germany's most dangerous man." Aggregated polling puts the AfD at roughly 42 percent, with the governing Christian Democrats (CDU) trailing near 20-22 percent, the Left Party around 12 percent, the Social Democrats near 8 percent and the Greens at about 5 percent.

A win of that scale would make Saxony-Anhalt, a state of roughly 2 million people in the former East Germany, the first place in postwar Germany where a far-right party leads a state government outright. Whether the AfD actually clears the threshold to govern alone will come down to arithmetic as much as popularity: mainstream parties hovering near the 5 percent cutoff for seats could determine how many mandates are left for everyone else, according to Al Jazeera's reporting from Magdeburg.

A crumbling firewall

For years, Germany's mainstream parties maintained a strict "firewall," refusing any coalition or governing arrangement with the AfD, which domestic intelligence services in several states — including Saxony-Anhalt — have formally classified as confirmed right-wing extremist. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has again ruled out cooperation with the party, citing its use of language echoing Nazi-era slogans. But the firewall guarantees nothing if the AfD wins enough seats to govern without any partner at all.

On the ground in Magdeburg, the shift is visible in voters like Mario Jung, a 59-year-old banking clerk who backed the CDU in previous elections but is switching to the AfD this year.

"The main reason for me to vote for the AfD is the economy," Jung told Al Jazeera.

Analysts caution the numbers don't fully back that instinct. Researchers at the Brookings Institution note the AfD's surge appears driven more by anxiety over migration and general economic dissatisfaction than by documented economic disadvantage in Saxony-Anhalt itself, which has one of the lowest unemployment rates in eastern Germany.

The vote is also being watched as a bellwether. Saxony-Anhalt's Landtag election on September 6 is the first of three closely watched eastern and northern state contests this month, with Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin both voting on September 20 — races that could compound the pressure on Merz's national coalition regardless of Sunday's outcome.

If the AfD falls just short of an outright majority, expect a scramble among the CDU, Left Party, SPD and Greens to cobble together a coalition capable of freezing it out of power — one that, given the polling gap, would likely need most of them at the table just to match the AfD's seat count. Final results are due Sunday night; German states typically confirm a new state premier within weeks of the vote.

Elsewhere in the region, a parallel dispatch tracing how record eastern German turnout models are scrambling the coalition math on the ground in Magdeburg offers a closer look at what happens if Sunday's numbers hold.