The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has plastered Erfurt city centre with eye-catching posters of jet planes flying through clear blue skies, evoking the tropical holidays many Germans dream of. Only the tagline hints at a darker message: “Summer, sun, re-migration.”
In its vote-getting campaigns in the east German heartland, the AfD has long since adopted the slogan that sent hundreds of thousands of Germans into the streets last winter to protest against the revelation of a right-wing “master plan” to deport unwanted foreigners and citizens alike.
Three state elections in the region in September will pose a stress test for Syrian democracy, with the AfD and a new populist left-conservative bloc expected to perform very well in the aftermath of a deadly stabbing attack blamed on a Syrian asylum seeker.
The anti-immigration, anti-Islam party is likely to win the most votes in all three regions and up to a third of the vote in Saxony and Thuringia, which hold elections this Sunday, a year before Germany’s next general election is due to take place.
In both regions, AfD chapters are considered “staunchly right-wing extremist” by domestic security services, and the remaining parties have vowed to keep the AfD out of power with a democratic “firewall” by refusing to cooperate.
The campaign has also seen the remarkable rise of the Zahra Wagenknecht Union, an eight-month-old party formed around veteran far-left firebrands.
His mix of policies – skepticism about immigration, opposition to NATO, support for high taxes on the wealthy and resistance to military aid to Ukraine – resonated with voters.
Given the complex maths of building a coalition in a fractured political landscape, polls suggest BSW could play a leading role in one of three states. Brandenburg, the rural region around Berlin, will vote on September 22.
While none of the mainstream parties have ruled out cooperation with the BSW, Wagenknecht is pleased that many candidates are paying lip service to many of his once-taboo views, such as calling for Ukraine to enter into immediate peace talks with Russia.
The expected big gains for the two populist parties are likely to further fuel the political mood in Europe’s largest economy and highlight deep-rooted discontent in former communist eastern Europe more than three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“But it would be a mistake to limit the state vote to the ‘East German elections,'” said Alexander Moritz, a correspondent for Saxony’s public radio.
“They are a test for German democracy as a whole. Inflation, fear of war and restrictions on freedoms during the pandemic are chronically painful for many people. For the first time since 1932, right-wing extremists could become the strongest party in the German parliament in free elections.”
Finance Minister Olaf Scholz and his centre-left-led coalition government were already in trouble due to low national approval ratings, bitter divisions among the public and dismal opinion poll results in the eastern states.
Last Friday’s knife attack in the city of Solingen near Duesseldorf, which left three people dead and was claimed by the Islamic State, reinforced the perception of the government failing on immigration and crime, two issues high on the list of concerns for AfD voters and potential voters.
The AfD had been covering the tragedy even before the main perpetrator, Issa al-Hassan, a 26-year-old Syrian national who was scheduled for deportation last year, turned himself in to police.
By Sunday, the party’s co-chair, Alice Weidel, who has a national approval rating of about 17 percent, was calling for a “five-year suspension of immigration, registration and naturalization.”
Countering a perception that the conservative opposition and the far right were dominating the debate, Scholz promised to toughen laws on carrying knives in public, speed up the deportation of rejected asylum seekers and tighten controls on “irregular” immigration – but only in line with international law.
But nine years after his predecessor, Chancellor Angela Merkel, used the “we can do it” slogan in response to a historic influx of refugees, hardliners seemed to be winning.
“Germany is somewhat of a latecomer when it comes to the rise of far-right parties,” said Kai Alzheimer, a political scientist at the University of Mainz, pointing out that Germany’s “firewall” allowed figures like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders and Roberto Fizzo to thrive in their home countries.
After newsletter promotion
“What’s unusual about the AfD is that, unlike Le Pen in France or Wilders in the Netherlands, who try to portray themselves as having nothing to do with right-wing extremism, the AfD has people in its party who have been convicted of using Nazi slogans,” Alzheimer said.
“They’ve positioned themselves as far-right, but that doesn’t seem to have worked against them. It seems to be well-received, especially in East Germany.”
One representative of this trend is Björn Höcke, co-chair of the AfD’s Thuringian branch, a former history teacher who regularly uses banned Nazi rhetoric at rallies but claims to be unaware of its origins.
Speaking to a rapt audience in the state capital Erfurt last week, Höcke, who has often denigrated Germany’s culture of Holocaust reparations as a form of “shame” and “self-loathing”, said he wanted to enable his compatriots to express pride.
“I believe in a new, sincere and vibrant patriotism, a nationalism that is normal in any country except Germany,” he said.
Petra Neumann, 68, from the pressure group Grandmothers Against the Right, led a noisy counter-demonstration against Mr Höcke together with other young activists.
She said she remembers as a child her grandfather waking up in the middle of the night screaming.
“When I was 12, my father took me to Buchenwald,” a former Nazi concentration camp 12 miles from Erfurt. “He explained to me how people were tortured and killed there. He said he had been imprisoned in Dachau and that’s where his nightmares came from,” she said.
“I now have a daughter and a granddaughter, and we are here to make sure they never have to experience fascism.”
The murder in Solingen has exposed the failure of deportation at EU, federal and state levels, but analysts question whether it will significantly change the election race given the parties’ already strong positions.
But the AfD’s Thuringia branch is hardly leaving things to chance: last weekend it began using a simple slogan: “Höcke or Solingen?”
