AfD Poised for Electoral Romp in What Could Be Triumphal March for German Far-Right

ATHENS — An election Sunday at the German state of Saxony-Anhalt could yield the far-right Alternative for Germany party a breakthrough for an ideology that some had reckoned was long-banished from the European continent. Saxony-Anhalt, with its capital at Magdeburg, is one of Germany’s 16 federal states and was part of the communist German Democratic Republic before the country was reunited in 1990 with the fall of the Soviet Union. The AfD’s leading candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, was once named “Germany’s Most Dangerous Man” by Der Spiegel.Mr. Siegmund’s party is leading in the polls and is expected to garner more than 40 percent of the vote. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union party is hovering at 20 percent, with a somewhat resurgent leftist party, Die Linke, at 12 percent. The AfD’s election platform is entitled “The Country First,” which echoes the Nazi slogan of “Germany Above All.”The AfD was founded as a Euroskeptic party in 2013, and gained momentum in the wake of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to admit some 1 million refugees from Syria’s civil war. At a national level, the anti-immigration — and pro-Russia — party is the second largest in the Bundestag, having secured 21 percent of the vote in last year’s federal elections.The AfD though, is locked into the opposition by dint of what Germans call the “Brandmauer,” for firewall, blocking the country’s far-right parties from participation in any coalition. That policy, which has been reemphasized by Mr. Merz, is born of Germany’s experience with National Socialism. There are signs, though, that attempts to exclude the AfD are faltering: In 2023 an AfD candidate, Hannes Loth, won a mayoralty at one of Saxony-Anhalt’s small hamlets. Mr. Merz has also ruled out cooperation with Germany’s hard leftists.Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has classified some AfD state associations as inimical to democratic values and “extremist” because the “ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding of the people prevailing within the party is incompatible with the free democratic order.” A decision on whether to rule the whole party unconstitutional would have to be made by Germany’s highest tribunal, the Federal Constitutional Court.German intelligence point to the party’s “Islamophobic, racist, and antisemitic statements,” and reckon that some elements of the AfD want “to abolish representative democracy in its current state.” Mr. Siegmund’s deputy at Saxon-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, has declared “our enemies don’t sit in Moscow, they sit in Magdeburg and Berlin!” Mr. Merz, whose approval rating has plummeted to a shocking 13 percent, said last month with respect to the AfD that “Cooperation between my party and this party and its officials is not possible. There can be no compromises.” He is next scheduled to face voters in 2027, when Germany returns to the polls for federal elections. The AfD is now the most popular party nationally, enjoying the support of 28 percent of Germans.The German analyst Hans Kundnani writes that “what makes the AfD’s rise especially shocking is that it is much more extreme than other European far-right parties that are either already in power, like Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, or could be soon, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.” Polls also put the AfD ahead in an upcoming election in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which will vote on September 20.Victories at Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern would put the AfD at the helm of two of Germany’s 16 states, and possibly make them the favorite to claim the chancellery in 2027. On the hustings, the party is advocating peace — some would say surrender to Moscow — with respect to the war between Russia and Ukraine. That is in stark contrast to the program of remilitarization adopted by Mr. Merz, who declares his desire to field “the strongest conventional army in Europe.”A leader of the AfD, Beatrix von Storch, told The New York Sun last year that the true threat of antisemitism in Germany comes from leftists and migrants, but her party has at times exhibited a troubling relationship to the memory of the Third Reich. An AfD candidate, Jens Maier, told a crowd in 2017 that “I hereby declare this cult of guilt to be over. To be over, once and for all.” Another party official, Björn Höcke, was twice convicted and fined for using a banned Nazi slogan.Another erstwhile leader of the party, Alexander Gauland, called the Holocaust a speck of “bird shit” in Germany’s otherwise glorious history. An AfD lawmaker, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper last year that members of the Nazi SS, who undertook mass slaughter of Jews and others, were not necessarily criminals. The party is now led by Alice Weidel, who has called for “an interest-driven foreign policy for our country” in place of one predicated on “values.”The persistence of the firewall means that even if the AfD does not win an outright majority at Saxony-Anhalt — it is polling at 41 percent — Mr. Merz’s CDU could face a difficult time forming a government. State law mandates that a new legislature must be constituted within 30 days of the election.

AfD Poised for Electoral Romp in What Could Be Triumphal March for German Far-Right

AfD Poised for Electoral Romp in What Could Be Triumphal March for German Far-Right

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