AfD leads tight race as German voters in eastern state head to polls

German voters head to regional elections on Sunday in a formerly communist eastern state where the far-right AfD party is narrowly ahead in the polls.

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany has long railed against Chancellor Olaf Scholz's unpopular coalition government which faces national elections a year from now.

In the state election in Brandenburg, the AfD hopes to replicate the strong gains it made in the east three weeks ago when it won a parliamentary vote in Thuringia and came a close second in Saxony.

A loss in Brandenburg to the AfD, which surrounds the capital Berlin, would be another blow to Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD). The center-left party has governed the state since Germany's reunification in 1990.

"If the SPD does not come out on top in the elections, it will be a very hard blow for the Social Democrats and Scholz," political scientist Benjamin Hoehne said.

A bruising defeat would mean "the debate about who in the SPD would be the best candidate for chancellor is likely to accelerate", said Hoehne of the Technical University of Chemnitz.

Infighting in the government has seen Scholz's approval ratings take a dive while his defence minister, fellow Social Democrat Boris Pistorius, often tops surveys as Germany's most popular politician.

In the long run-up to national elections in September 2025, the opposition conservatives of the CDU-CSU alliance last week selected their party leader Friedrich Merz as their top candidate.

AfD edge

Some 2.2 million people aged over 16 are eligible to vote in Brandenburg.

The state takes in wealthy towns such as Potsdam, with its Prussian-era Sanssouci Palace, as well as thinly populated rural areas and industrial zones, one of which houses a Tesla plant.

Popular SPD state premier Dietmar Woidke has kept his distance during the campaign from his party colleague Scholz, even though the chancellor's electoral district is Potsdam.

Sixty-two-year-old Woidke, in office for over a decade, has instead thrown down a challenge to voters by declaring that he will quit unless the SPD wins an outright majority.

However, the latest polls give the AfD an edge, predicting it will win with 27-29 percent of the vote, even as the SPD has recently narrowed the gap and polled at 25-26 percent.

Even if the AfD wins, it is unlikely to govern, as all other parties have ruled out forming a coalition with them.

But their rise has heaped political pressure on Scholz's SPD and his governing allies, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats.

The decade-old AfD has stoked and capitalised on public fears about irregular migration after a string of recent extremist attacks.

Germany was especially shocked by a knife rampage that killed three people and wounded eight in the western city of Solingen last month.

Police arrested an asylum-seeker who allegedly claimed allegiance to the Daesh group and had evaded a deportation order.