Ulrich Siegmund arrived in Berlin on Monday, one day after leading the AfD to 43.8 percent in Sachsen-Anhalt, its best result ever in a German state election. Sachsen-Anhalt is one of sixteen German states, with about 1.7 million eligible voters, a fraction of the national electorate of sixty million. Siegmund then ruled out the two arrangements that could plausibly have put him in office anyway. No toleration. No minority government. “We won’t play games,” he said, calling both “unstable.” Sahra Wagenknecht’s proposal for a cross-party premier he dismissed as “Gewurschtel,” roughly: a mess nobody should touch. Alice Weidel, standing beside him, insisted the party “takes governing responsibility seriously.” CDU state chief Sven Schulze conceded the opposite the same day: “We are the opposition. The mandate to govern lies with the AfD now.”
The AfD fell three seats short of a majority. It did not, on this evidence, look like a party reaching for one.
Governing in coalition means keeping some promises and breaking others in public, then spending years explaining the gap. Every incumbent party in Sachsen-Anhalt just paid that price. It is the actual mechanism behind the CDU’s collapse from 37.1 to 17.2 percent. A road AfD oviously tries to avoid.
None of this reached Elon Musk. “Gut gemacht,” he wrote on X within hours, replying to Weidel. Siegmund thanked him for the “support” and promised, in English, a “strong and constructive cooperation,” adding that Germany would again be worth investing in. The world’s richest man congratulated a regional election result as though it were a change of government, in a country whose coalition arithmetic he has evidently never had to sit through once. He builds rockets and sells cars. On what he was actually praising, he was simply wrong, and confidently so, which is the only part of the performance that was authentically his.
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