Berlin: The Alternative for Germany was on track to become the first far-right party to win a regional election in Germany since World War II, projections showed, giving it unprecedented power even if other parties are sure to exclude it from office.

The AfD was set to win 33.2 per cent of the vote in the state of Thuringia, comfortably ahead of the conservatives’ 23.6 per cent, broadcaster ZDF’s projection showed on Sunday, a vote share that, depending on final seat allocations, could let it block decisions requiring a two-thirds majority.

The appointment of judges or top security officials are among such decisions. If the AfD, led in Thuringia by Bjoern Hoecke - its most extreme and controversial figure - decides to block them, it could weaken an apparatus, built up painstakingly over decades, designed to police and disrupt far-right forces.

In neighbouring Saxony, projections put the conservatives, who have run the state since 1990, on 31.5 per cent, just 1.1 percentage points ahead of the AfD.

Conservative state premier Michael Kretschmer, who hailed the result as a success and a mandate to form a new government, blamed the strength of the far right on Social Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s fractious coalition in Berlin.

“There is a huge lack of trust in politics that has to end,” he said. “We need another political style in Berlin.”

With a year to go until Germany’s national election, the results are punishing for Scholz’s coalition. All three ruling parties lost votes, with only his SPD comfortably clearing the 5 per cent threshold needed to stay in parliament.

The anti-immigration AfD may have drawn momentum in the final week of the election from a deadly knife attack at a festival in the western city of Solingen, allegedly by an illegally resident Syrian national whom authorities had failed to deport.