Why does the far-right AfD hold such appeal for voters in the German region going to the polls?

Berlin. Results on Sunday evening. Polling stations will close at 6 pm and shortly afterwards television channels will begin to release exit poll figures, followed by the actual results of the vote count. These are the final hours of waiting for the outcome of the elections in Saxony-Anhalt, which, with just over 2.1 million inhabitants, is the third of the five eastern Länder after Saxony (4.03 million) and Brandenburg (2.6 million). Taken together – including those under 16 who are not eligible to vote – the inhabitants of the region, whose capital is Magdeburg, account for one fortieth of Germany’s total population (83.5 million); yet Sunday’s vote is causing Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the CDU some anxiety, and perhaps even more so his deputy, the Social Democratic ally Lars Klingbeil. Pollsters have been saying it for months: in Saxony-Anhalt, the nationalist AfD party is surging unchecked: at 41 per cent according to Forschungsgruppe Wahlen and as high as 43 per cent according to INSA. The CDU is struggling at between 22 and 23 per cent, whilst the SPD stands at 8 per cent; however, according to some, it could even slip below the 5 per cent threshold and be excluded, leading to a parliament comprising just three parties: the AfD, the CDU and the Left Party (Linke, projected at 11.5 per cent on the eve of the election). A comeback from the centre is impossible, but the outgoing Minister-President and re-election candidate, the Christian Democrat Sven Schulze, is facing the race with a smile: “The polls say that 48 per cent of voters would like me as governor and only 30 per cent my challenger Ulrich Siegmund”. Unfortunately for him, however, the German system does not provide for the direct election of either the Chancellor or the Minister-Presidents. Siegmund is smiling too, mainly to dispel the dark clouds surrounding the AfD – a party that is frightening partly because of its numbers, but above all because it makes no effort to conceal its links with the far right. An example? Patrick Harr, Siegmund’s press officer, was formerly a leading figure in the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend (HDJ), a group that organised summer camps where children were taught to be racist. The Federal Ministry of the Interior banned the HDJ in 2009 ‘for its ideological influence on young people through the dissemination of populist, racist, nationalist and National Socialist views’. In short, to resemble the Hitler Youth (HJ). Even more serious is the fact that Harr is not a lone wolf: several regional AfD leaders have been his lifelong associates, from the same circles and with the same affiliations. In Magdeburg, as in Berlin, the AfD is thus confirming its extremist and anti-establishment nature, as well as its not-too-subtle temptation to downplay the historical responsibilities of National Socialism – indeed, taking advantage of the election campaign to dust off here and there a few slogans worthy of Joseph Goebbels.

Only once the votes have been counted will it be known whether the AfD will manage to secure an absolute majority to govern alone in Saxony-Anhalt with extended powers over education – with its revisionist ‘Più Bismarck, meno Hitler’ programme – security, culture and the media. A blue-only coalition would be a first in Germany: a party to the right of the CDU securing a regional government position, thereby entering the Bundesrat (the Council of States) to engage with the federal government and vote on laws falling within regional remit.

The election of an AfD Minister-President, write Jana Puglierin and Janka Oertel, senior researchers at the European Council on Foreign Relations, “would be a stark demonstration of the political establishment’s inability to provide a convincing vision for the country’s economic, political and social future”. After six years of stagnant growth amid crises, tariffs and pandemics, the traditional parties have failed in their mission to inspire Germans to dream – or at the very least to hope – having thrown in the towel in the face of the far right and its revisionist agenda: a complete U-turn on immigration, climate change, integration and European defence, in exchange for nothing but a dose of cheap nationalism. It is also all too easy to hide behind the now outdated stereotype of the male, white, uneducated, low-income voter from the East. The AfD is strong throughout the country and particularly so in the former GDR. The words of Heinrich A. Winkler, aged 87, one of Germany’s leading experts on contemporary history, therefore give pause for thought. Speaking to the Tagesspiegel, Winkler observed that the AfD is an illiberal democratic party “of the sort that believes democracy is simply the will of the majority”, an attitude that reveals “shortcomings in historical and political education” and is a consequence of Germany’s division into two in 1945. “We in the West were fortunate enough to have been occupied by democratic powers that helped us build democracy.” On the other side was the Soviet Union.