The European Commission has confirmed it is not considering blocking EU funds for Saxony-Anhalt, after social media posts claimed Brussels would punish the eastern German state for voting heavily for the far-right Alternative for Germany. Euronews’ fact-checking team, The Cube, found no evidence for the claims, which spread widely online and were often illustrated with a photo of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
The AfD won a landslide in the state election on 6 September, taking 39 seats, more than twice as many as any other party but short of a majority. Other parties have refused to work with it, and no new state government has yet been formed. Von der Leyen’s own party, the CDU, fell to 17.2% of the vote and 15 seats, and she has criticised the AfD in the past, which may explain why posts named her as the author of a plan to withhold money.
The story appears to trace back to German Green MEP Daniel Freund. After the vote, he said he would push to freeze EU money to an AfD-led government if it breached European values or misused funds, and he pointed to earlier freezes in Poland and Hungary. Saxony-Anhalt is due to receive €2.95 billion under the 2021-2027 EU budget, including €1.3 billion from the European Regional Development Fund, €571 million from the European Social Fund and €594 million from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. According to Freund, it receives more EU money per head than any other German state, averaging over €650 per citizen across the budget cycle.
EU rules set a high bar for any freeze. Under the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, funding cannot be suspended simply because a particular party takes office; measures are only possible where breaches of the rule of law affect, or seriously risk affecting, the sound management of the EU budget. The Commission would have to propose any such step and the Council would decide. A spokesperson for the Saxony-Anhalt government said there would be “no legal basis for such a course of action” in the current situation.
The Commission said it monitors all member states and regions and acts where the legal frameworks require it, adding that an election result alone is not a legal basis for suspending funds. The AfD also did well in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania election a couple of weeks after the Saxony-Anhalt vote, while the Left won in Berlin. Elsewhere, money once frozen is flowing again: the Commission unlocked €137 billion for Poland in 2024 after Donald Tusk’s government introduced judicial reforms, and it has proposed releasing a first €4.2 billion tranche of cohesion funds to Hungary under Péter Magyar’s administration.
