According to the first exit polls at 18 p.m., the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the winner of Sunday's regional parliamentary elections in the German federal state of Thuringia, while in the elections in the federal state of Saxony it is in second place with a small gap behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU ).
About 3,3 million people had the right to vote in Saxony and almost 1,7 million in Thuringia.
The AfD won between 30,5 percent and 33,5 percent of the vote in Thuringia, and between 30 percent and 31,5 percent in Saxony.
Chancellor Olaf Šolc's Social Democrats recorded a new electoral decline with ratings between 6,5 and 8,5 percent in these two regions.
Germany's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has said it will not team up with the far-right AfD to form a majority in the parliaments of Thuringia and Saxony.
The general secretary of the CDU in those two regions of East Germany, Karsten Lineman, said that "the voters certainly know that there will be no coalition with the AfD".
He added that finding a parliamentary majority "will not be easy".
These elections are viewed with nervousness in Berlin, reports Beta.
Another provincial election follows on September 22 in another eastern state, Brandenburg, which is currently led by the Social Democrats of the German Prime Minister, Olaf Solac.
The next parliamentary elections in the country should be held in a little more than a year.
AfD co-president Alis Vajdel described the September 1 vote as "an important step towards next year's national parliamentary elections".
That party won first place in the city and provincial governments last year.
The AfD is the strongest party in the former communist east of the country and the domestic intelligence agency keeps the party's branches in both Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as "proven right-wing extremist groups".
The leader of the party in Thuringia, Bjorn Hocke, was convicted of intentionally using a Nazi slogan at political events, but the appeal process is ongoing.
The CDU has ruled Saxony since German reunification in 1990.
Politics in Thuringia is especially complicated because the Left Party of Governor Boda Ramelov has fallen to an insignificant level at the national level.
Sahra Vagenknecht, long one of the most prominent figures of the party, left the party last year to form the new party "Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht" (BSV), which now has better results than the Left Party.
The CDU has long refused to cooperate with the Left Party, which emerged from East Germany's ruling communists. The CDU has not ruled out cooperation with the Vagenknecht party's BSV.
Strong support for the AfD and BSV is fueled by dissatisfaction with the national government, which is notorious for internal friction. Both parties are strongest in the less wealthy east of the country.
The AfD is capitalizing on strong anti-immigrant sentiment in the region. After last week's knife attack in the western town of Solingen, which was blamed on an extremist from Syria, the German government announced new restrictions on knives and new measures to facilitate deportations.
Germany's attitude towards the war in Ukraine is also one of the issues. Berlin is the second largest supplier of arms to Ukraine after the United States, and this is exactly something that both AfD and BSV oppose.
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