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BERLIN, Sept. 23-- The recent state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg have shown again how voters in Germany were polarized and the extent to which the political center was shrinking, experts said. The country's ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and German Social Democratic (SPD) parties have suffered greatly in the early September elections, yielding ground to the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. In Saxony, the center-right CDU secured a clear victory with 32.1 percent of the vote ahead of the AfD, which garnered 27 percent. In Brandenburg, the center-left SPD was supported by 26.2 percent of the voters, while the AfD won 23.5 percent. "Voter participation rose significantly but at the the same time the ideological extremes chalked up large gains," Michael Broening, head of international policy analysis at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), told Xinhua. As a consequence, forces in the center have emerged from the ballot "massively weakened." The SPD and the CDU had both clearly ruled out forming a coalition with the AfD, dashing that party's hopes of entering a regional government for the first time in its history. The AfD is mainly associated with an anti-immigrant ideology, which earned the party nationwide appeal and substantial media coverage in the wake of the 2017 "refugee crisis." Throughout the AfD's eastern German strongholds, net immigration is largely negligible if not non-existent. | 
