The Alternative for Germany has won elections in the eastern region of Thuringia, the first time a far-right party has secured victory in a state poll in the country’s postwar history.

According to preliminary results, the AfD garnered 32.8 per cent in Thuringia, way ahead of all other parties. The centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was in second place with 23.6 per cent.

In the neighbouring state of Saxony, projections by public broadcaster ZDF put the two parties neck and neck, with the CDU projected to win 31.9 per cent and the AfD to come second with 30.6 per cent.

Tino Chrupalla, the AfD’s co-leader, described the party’s result in Thuringia as “sensational”. 

“One thing is clear: the will of the voters is that there should be political change, both in Saxony and in Thuringia,” he said. “If you want to do credible politics, you won’t be able to do it without the AfD.”

The results are a disaster for the parties in chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition, with the Social Democrats, Greens and liberals all predicted to sink to single-digits in both states.

In Thuringia, the SPD had its worst result in a regional election in postwar German history, scoring just 6.1 per cent.

They reflect mounting voter frustration among East Germans with a government many associate with high inflation, economic stagnation, surging energy costs and constant internecine squabbling.

But they also show how voters are increasingly abandoning the centre ground for populist parties on the political margins.

Omid Nouripour, the Greens’ co-chair, described the election as a “turning point”.

“People from the world of culture, people with immigrant roots, people who go to Gay Pride are really scared,” Nouripour said. “We have to stand together with them and defend democracy.”

The AfD is not the only beneficiary of the East Germans’ anger: they also voted in large numbers for a new far-left party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which won 15.8 per cent in Thuringia and was projected by ZDF to win 11.8 per cent in Saxony.

Voters were attracted to both the AfD and BSW by their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Both parties have heavily criticised German weapons supplies to Kyiv, as well as western sanctions against Russia, and called for negotiations to bring about an end to the fighting.

The result has shown that 34 years after German reunification, a majority of people in two regions of the former communist east of the country are deeply disillusioned with the mainstream parties of the centre and frustrated with the way Germany is run.

Despite its stunning performance in Thuringia, the AfD will not be able to form a government there. Since no other party will co-operate with it, it will not enjoy the parliamentary majority needed to rule.

The AfD, which was formed 11 years ago by economists angry at the Eurozone bailouts, has morphed into a hardline, historically revisionist nationalist party vehemently opposed to immigration.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has designated the party’s local Saxon and Thuringian branches as “rightwing extremist”.

In Thuringia the party is led by Björn Höcke, an ethno-nationalist who has been fined twice by local courts this year for using banned Nazi slogans in speeches to supporters. 

It could prove difficult to form viable coalitions without the AfD, however. For the CDU to govern in Thuringia, for example, it might have to team up with the BSW, an option that would be hard to swallow for many in the centre-right party. 

Wagenknecht, a former communist who many see as an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin, has made changing Germany’s policy on Ukraine a precondition for any coalition talks.

She said her voters wanted to see “a different foreign policy in Germany”.

“They want to achieve more peace, more diplomacy, and that’s our condition for [joining] a government,” she said on ZDF.

That has triggered outrage in the CDU, which has been steadfast in its support for Ukraine and has pressed the Scholz government, already the second-largest provider of military assistance to Kyiv after the US, to supply even more weapons.

Höcke has taken a similar position to Wagenknecht, saying in his campaign speeches that the AfD was against Germany “being dragged into a war with Russia by some wacko western elites”.

But it might even prove impossible for the CDU to form a government with the BSW. Analysis by ZDF showed that even a three-way coalition between the CDU, BSW and the Social Democrats would be one seat short of a majority in the 90-seat Thuringian parliament. 

The election campaign was also overshadowed by the August 23 terror attack in the west German town of Solingen, when a man fatally stabbed three people and injured eight others. The man, a Syrian national suspected of being a member of Isis, was arrested a day after the attack after handing himself in to police.

Both the AfD and BSW seized on the incident to claim that uncontrolled immigration had led to a surge in violent crime on German streets and to demand that asylum-seekers who have committed crimes be deported.

The disastrous performance of the three parties in Scholz’s coalition — the SPD, Greens and liberals — has led to speculation that one of them might withdraw from the government, triggering snap elections.

But experts say such an outcome is unlikely. All three are polling so badly nationwide that there is little appetite to face voters ahead of the next scheduled election in the autumn of 2025.

Donald Trump’s new proposal for the government or insurance companies to be mandated to pay for in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment for Americans has already divided the Republican party – with two GOP senators giving opposing stances on the matter on Sunday.

The ex-president has been trying to navigate the post-Roe landscape since 2022, with limited success. As his presidential campaign has progressed throughout 2024, Trump has repeatedly claimed credit for appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn federal protections on abortion — while he has simultaneously sought to distance himself from hardline opponents of abortion who are seeking to ban IVF and other fertility treatments, as well as the stricter end of GOP-led proposals to ban abortion at various points during the pregnancy.

Over the past week, the former president made his latest attempt.

Speaking to NBC News minutes before taking the stage in Potterville, Michigan, the ex-president made two announcements on the issue.

First, he put forward a plan to force insurance companies or the federal government to cover the costs of IVF for all Americans. And second, he came out against Florida’s six-week abortion ban, which he said restricted abortion too early into the pregnancy.

Campaign aides would clarify over the next few days that this did not mean he would support a ballot measure up for debate this year in Florida that would enshrine abortion access into the state constitution.

Both statements triggered furious responses from within his own party. Anti-abortion groups and supporters of Florida’s conservative Governor Ron DeSantis ripped Trump for his supposed betrayal in statements to the press and on social media.

And on Sunday, two Republican senators appearing in separate interviews across NBC and ABC took opposite positions on the pledge by Trump to fund IVF either through public or private means — suggesting that the plan will cause more internal divisions for the right as the general election nears.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton — a MAGA populist — said that he could see himself supporting the former president’s plan and added that he thought “most Republicans” would be open to doing so.

“It’s something I’m open to, that most Republicans would be open to,” he said, before adding that he would need to determine the “fiscal impact” of such a proposal first and consider “whether the taxpayer can afford to pay for this, what impact it would have on premiums.”

He went on to claim that to his knowledge, no Republicans in Congress opposed the legality of IVF (a factually untrue statement, whether he knows it or not) and claimed that no state governments made fertility care “unaccessible” — though it was briefly blocked in Alabama earlier this year after a push by conservatives to extend the rights of a human being to unborn fetuses through the courts. That same strategy is being pushed by supporters of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for reshaping the federal government, which is tied to numerous former Trump administration officials.

“In principle, supporting couples who are trying to use IVF or other fertility treatments — I don’t think that’s controversial at all,” Cotton added.

But the same morning that Cotton proclaimed Republicans would be open to Trump’s proposal, Lindsey Graham appeared on ABC’s This Week and immediately dimissed that idea.

Trump, he argued, was trying to show his support for the practice of providing IVF treatments to families seeking to have children. The furthest Graham seemed prepared to go was a hypothetical tax credit for families undergoing IVF but he was firmly opposed to forcing insurance companies to directly fund the procedure. He added that it may be an issue on which Republicans could find “common ground” with Democrats.

“I wouldn’t [support that] because there’s no end to that,” he said. “I think a tax credit for children makes sense, means tested.”

“We’ve been accused — the party has — of being against birth control. We’re not. We’ve been accused of being against IVF treatments. We’re not,” Graham added as his explanation for Trump’s latest announcement.

First, though, he’ll have to find common ground with the rest of his party. Graham remains the lead Senate supporter of efforts to restrict abortion at the national level — an idea the Trump campaign has repeatedly insisted the former president opposes.

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate and Graham’s colleague in the Senate GOP caucus, echoed that opposition last week on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Regardless of how GOP senators and members of Congress come out on the issue of funding for IVF over the next days or weeks, the Republican party will still have to contend with the push by the anti-abortion right to extend “personhood” rights to unborn fetuses through the court system. Many on the far right are looking at the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which voted to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022, as the easiest vessel to achieve their goal of banning abortion and some fertility care nationwide without going through Congress.

The Harris campaign continues to pummel Trump over the twin issues of abortion and IVF as well. Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has talked about his own experiences seeking fertility treatments with his wife as Democrats have argued that Republicans are overreaching into Americans’ personal and private medical choices.

“Donald Trump’s own platform could effectively ban IVF and abortion nationwide,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said on Thursday.

“Trump lies as much if not more than he breathes, but voters aren’t stupid. Because Trump overturned Roe vs. Wade, IVF is already under attack and women’s freedoms have been ripped away in states across the country. There is only one candidate in this race who trusts women and will protect our freedom to make our own health care decisions: Vice President Kamala Harris.”

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Ukraine has won itself some breathing room — on the battlefield with its Kursk offensive, and financially through a debt restructuring deal with private investors. But now, the amount of financial resources Kyiv can count on to ensure the country’s survival hinges on a strangely contorted discussion between western allies.

It concerns how to financially engineer a $50bn advance on money relating to Russian central bank reserves that western jurisdictions have blocked Moscow’s access to. In June, G7 leaders committed to “extraordinary revenue acceleration loans”. After earlier unedifying hold-ups of funding packages on both sides of the Atlantic, this was presented as proof that the west could still stand up for Ukraine and make Russia pay for the country’s destruction.

Don’t be too impressed. The very need for a financially engineered loan betrays both an unseemly quest for alternatives to western taxpayer funding and the continued refusal to enforce Russia’s obligation to compensate Ukraine by transferring its immobilised assets outright. In this sense, the commitment at the Puglia summit was a sign of timidity not confidence, even if $50bn from whatever source is a whole lot better than nothing.

But even that remains far from a done deal, with technical difficulties reflecting deeper political challenges.

The idea is for a syndicate of Ukraine’s friends to take up a loan, then channel it through a trustee institution such as the World Bank. Kyiv’s resulting debt-service costs would be covered by the extraordinary profits that Euroclear, the Belgian securities custodian, is making on nearly €200bn of cash balances it is prohibited from paying out to Russia’s central bank.

These war profits (which is what they are, through no fault of Euroclear’s) ought morally to go to Ukraine anyway, which is why the EU recently decided to channel much of them to military aid. The new G7 plan is essentially to repurpose and “accelerate” this profit stream into a big upfront cheque.

That is enough to show the G7 is granting no additional money beyond what Ukraine was already rightly set to receive, let alone any belonging to Moscow. The scheme is already being used to argue that less needs to be spent by western governments themselves — witness Berlin’s shameful plan to cut aid for Ukraine.

G7 leaders left it to technocrats to make good on the political promise, such as it is. But important technical hurdles are far from cleared. The main function of securing the loan with future profits from holding Russian state assets is to make the loan as risk-free as possible for western Treasuries — at least risk-free enough not to have to get lawmakers’ approval, especially in the US Congress. It is also politically opportune to make more western countries take part than just the EU, where the money for debt service is generated. The flip side is that Kyiv’s indebtedness will increase, even if securitisation supposedly means it never has to pay anything.

But the EU only renews its sanctions for six months at a time, so that profit stream could cease as soon as a single member state vetoes renewal. That brings risk not just for non-EU members in the scheme but also Kyiv: a contingent fiscal liability could complicate the IMF’s debt sustainability judgments. To address this, Brussels has presented EU governments with options that include longer renewal periods or tying the end of the asset block to Moscow compensating Kyiv.

The former would require Hungary to relinquish its twice-yearly veto power. The latter would be tantamount to the confiscation so strongly feared by Paris, Berlin and the European Central Bank. Neither option seems likely to gain unanimity. In any case, it is hard to see how the loan documents can avoid recourse to something more than the profit stream in case Russia miraculously returns to international good standing sooner than expected — and regains access to its reserves.

In a nutshell, the problem is that western leaders have tried to get something for nothing: new funding for Kyiv, but with no new taxpayer commitments, no financial risk and no seizure of the assets even of a criminal state. These political contradictions cannot be solved, at most they can be camouflaged, by technocratic solutions.

Only a political choice to set a new legal precedent would cut through this Gordian knot: a transparent decision to jointly confiscate Russia’s assets outright for Ukraine’s benefit. It may still come to that as political contradictions become unsustainable. But the longer it takes, the more is lost in waiting. In the meantime, making good on the Puglia promise would be welcome — but no one should imagine that will close the issue for more than a few months.

martin.sandbu@ft.com