State elections in the German state of Thuringia show the far-right AfD party far ahead of the others, DW reported.
Results in the German state of Saxony show similar gains.
In Thuringia, AfD won nearly 10% more than the center-right conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), which won second place by a large margin.
The results show a significant gain for the party: In 2014, AfD won 10.6% of the votes in Thuringia, and in 2019, the party won 23.4% of the votes. However, the recent results indicate that AfD may have won nearly a third - 32.8% - of the votes.
In Saxony, CDU won 31.9% of the vote, followed closely by AfD with 30.6%. The BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) party is a far-off third, winning just 11.8% of the vote.
Following these results, Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, President of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), stated: "The election results in the German federal states of Thuringia and Saxony are a clear wake-up call to the centrist parties in Germany to listen to the real concerns and fears of the people."
"When half the population votes for parties on the extreme fringes, their problems must be addressed openly and honestly. Uppermost on the electorates’ mind are the issues of migration and internal security. If the political center will continue to ignore those issues, those political parties will disappear and the threatening, extreme ones will only grow stronger."