In Saxony-Anhalt, far-right AfD poised to upset mainstream

Sunday’s state election in Saxony-Anhalt is threatening to upend what has so far been the received narrative of Germany’s “super election year.” Though the results in the western states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate in March saw the Greens seize the initiative ahead of September’s general election, opinion polls in the eastern state suggest that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is about to get a serious boost. 

This has sharpened the focus on the problems facing the ailing Christian Democrats (CDU) at both ends of the political spectrum: While Angela Merkel’s center-right CDU seems to be bleeding votes to the Greens in western Germany, it has the opposite problem in Saxony-Anhalt, a state where the AfD is currently polling at up to 26%.  

It is as if, as some pundits have pointed out, the CDU is having to fight two different election campaigns, against parties with exactly opposite political views.  

Premier Reiner Haseloff still is the most popular politician in Saxony-Anhalt

Scary opinion polls 

Though the latest opinion polls show the CDU and the AfD neck and neck in Saxony-Anhalt, one particular poll carried out on May 26 by INSA sent a fright through Germany’s political mainstream: It had the AfD leading the race, with a 26% vote share, just ahead of the CDU, at 25%, with the other main parties — the Greens, the Social Democrats (SPD), the Left, and the Free Democrats (FDP) — all limping a long way behind, at 6%-13%. 

A vcictory would not give the AfD a role in the state government, since the far-right remains a coalition pariah for all the other parties.  

But it represents a serious headache for Saxony-Anhalt’s CDU state premier, Reiner Haseloff, of the CDU, who currently leads a centrist coalition with the SPD and the Greens. If the result pans out the way the above polls predicts, the “acceptable” partners will be so weak that even a three-way coalition would not bring a majority. That would leave the CDU with the unthinkable prospect of joining a coalition with the Left party, almost as much of a taboo as making a common cause with the AfD. 

What’s going on in eastern Germany?  

The situation is baffling for many in Germany: The AfD is hampered by a divided leadership, no longer has a major news-dominating issue to galvanize its base as it did with the 2016 refugee crisis, and has shifted so far to the right that it has recently drawn the attention of domestic intelligence agencies charged with keeping tabs on political extremists.  

Though those factors have conspired to see the AfD’s support shrink in western Germany, the party has established itself as an ever-present force in all the states in the former East Germany, where it can count on over 20% of voters, as opposed to closer to 10% nationwide. 

For some, supporting the AfD is evidence of opposition to Germany’s political order itself. Marco Wanderwitz, a CDU lawmaker born in communist Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) and now the government’s commissioner for eastern Germany, threw a hand grenade into the debate last week when he declared that some people in eastern Germany just haven’t properly grasped democracy yet.

“We’re dealing with people who have partly been socialized by a dictatorship in such a way that they haven’t yet arrived in democracy even 30 years later,” he said on a podcast by a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. 

Saxony-Anhalt is one of Germany’s least-populous states

This understandably upset many eastern Germans and drew condemnation from within Wanderwitz’s own party, but it also illustrated just how deeply the Cold War division still cuts into Germany’s psyche: No matter what has happened in the past three decades, the political debate about eastern Germany is still defined by the period from 1949 to 1989.  

That historical grievance, coupled with a sense of having been economically “left behind” by western Germany after reunification, is often seen as Germany’s unique version of the issues that were said to have fueled the rise of populist nationalist leaders around the world, such as former US President Donald Trump. Many consider the AfD the only party that offers them a democratic way to voice their irritation at the political “elites” in Berlin. 

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Christian Lüth

  Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. “The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD,” Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. “We can always shoot them later, that’s not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn’t matter to me.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alexander Gauland

  Co-chairman Alexander Gauland said the German national soccer team’s defender Jerome Boateng might be appreciated for his performance on the pitch — but people would not want “someone like Boateng as a neighbor.” He also argued Germany should close its borders and said of an image showing a drowned refugee child: “We can’t be blackmailed by children’s eyes.”

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alice Weidel

  Alice Weidel generally plays the role of “voice of reason” for the far-right populists, but she, too, is hardly immune to verbal miscues. Welt newspaper, for instance, published a 2013 memo allegedly from Weidel in which she called German politicians “pigs” and “puppets of the victorious powers in World War II.” Weidel initially claimed the mail was fake, but now admits its authenticity.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Frauke Petry

  German border police should shoot at refugees entering the country illegally, the former co-chair of the AfD told a regional newspaper in 2016. Officers must “use firearms if necessary” to “prevent illegal border crossings.” Communist East German leader Erich Honecker was the last German politician who condoned shooting at the border.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Björn Höcke

  The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia made headlines for referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame” and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. The comments came just as Germany enters an important election year — leading AfD members moved to expel Höcke for his remarks.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Beatrix von Storch

  Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. “People who won’t accept STOP at our borders are attackers,” the European lawmaker said in 2016. “And we have to defend ourselves against attackers,” she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Marcus Pretzell

  Pretzell, former chairman of the AfD in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and husband to Frauke Petry, wrote, “These are Merkel’s dead,” shortly after news broke of the deadly attack on the Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andre Wendt

  The member of parliament in Germany’s eastern state of Saxony made waves in early 2016 with an inquiry into how far the state covers the cost of sterilizing unaccompanied refugee minors. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have sought asylum in Germany, according to the Federal Association for Unaccompanied Minor Refugees (BumF) — the vast majority of them young men.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Andre Poggenburg

  Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to “get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus” — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  Alexander Gauland, again …

  During a campaign speech in Eichsfeld in August 2017, AfD election co-candidate Alexander Gauland said that Social Democrat parliamentarian Aydan Özoguz should be “disposed of” back to Anatolia. The German term, “entsorgen,” raised obvious parallels to the imprisonment and killings of Jews and prisoners of war under the Nazis.

• AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks

  … and again

  Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD’s youth wing in June 2018. Acknowledging Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, he went on to say Germany had a “glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

  Author: Dagmar Breitenbach, Mark Hallam

Demographics, economics, and grievances  

And yet, the demographic changes following reunification have arguably had a greater effect: Saxony-Anhalt has lost a quarter of its population since reunification, leaving only 2.2 million people today. (The state has the third-lowest population density in Germany, behind two other eastern German states.) As a result, Saxony-Anhalt now has the oldest population of any state in Germany, with an average age of 47.9 (as measured in 2019 by the federal government’s “Demografie Portal”).  

This also offers a clue that Germany’s political divisions may not, as Wanderwitz implied, simply reflect the former East-West border: After all, the Greens are also currently the strongest party in the city councils of Potsdam, Dresden and Leipzig, some of eastern Germany’s main urban centers. Indeed, studies by the pollster infratest dimap have shown that across Germany, the Greens are strongest in areas where the population is growing, while the AfD tends to be strongest in areas where populations are shrinking. 

Though this demographic shift has inevitably caused economic damage in former East Germany, it would be misleading to blame the rise of the AfD on impoverishment: Saxony-Anhalt’s economic figures have been improving in recent years, with a rising GDP and a dropping unemployment rate of 7.5%, only 1.6 percentage point above the national rate.

Equally, according to official statistics agency Statista, the wage gap between eastern and western Germany has shrunk considerably — down from 22% in 2015 to 15% in 2020. Former East Germans in states like Saxony-Anhalt may feel “left behind” by the politics of those in urban areas, but, economically at least, they are also catching up.  

As for Sunday’s election, Haseloff is most likely to retain his post as Saxony-Anhalt’s state premier, given that, despite the CDU’s wider malaise, he remains the state’s most popular politician — though some suggest he’s helped by the fact that many people in the state haven’t even heard of the leading candidates of the other parties. The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic remains the state’s most important issue, and here Haseloff can point to the fact that he has presided over some of the lowest infection rates in the country. The future of the state will depend on how well his potential coalition partners perform. 

While you’re here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society, with an eye toward understanding this year’s elections and beyond. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing, to stay on top of developments as Germany enters the post-Merkel era.

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/in-saxony-anhalt-far-right-afd-poised-to-upset-mainstream/a-57742250?maca=en-rss-en-ger-1023-xml-atom