Germany’s far right forecast to make big gains in key state elections

A man faces a crowd, lifting both hands in the air.

By Laura KingStaff Writer

Aug. 29, 2024 3 AM PT

BERLIN — It’s become a painful pattern for Germany’s political mainstream: Once again, a far-right party that for many evokes the country’s Nazi past is poised for an unprecedented show of electoral strength.

The populist-nationalist Alternative for Germany, or AfD — which in a little over a decade has gone from a stridently anti-immigrant fringe movement to a growing force in local and national politics — is forecast to perform strongly or even place first in two state elections Sunday in the former East Germany. A third vote in another eastern state is set later in September.

If the AfD takes the largest vote share in any of the balloting, as public opinion polling suggests is likely, it would mark the first such triumph at the state level for a German far-right party since World War II.

A man in a white shirt, left, and a woman in a blue shirt, with arms around each other, face a crowd

“It’s definitely a dramatic shift,” said Constantin Wurthmann, a professor of comparative politics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, referring to the expected trouncing of parties aligned with the governing coalition of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Analysts say the AfD is likely to benefit from both the location and timing of the votes. All three states — Saxony and Thuringia, which vote Sunday, and the rural state of Brandenburg, surrounding Berlin, where balloting will be held Sept. 22 — lie in the eastern heartland, where the party enjoys its greatest support.

And just nine days before the first of those votes, tensions over immigration spiked sharply over a grisly stabbing spree in which a Syrian man has been charged.

Depending on the outcome, the trio of votes could be the AfD’s second big jolt to the German political establishment this year. The party, which is under monitoring by the country’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism and anti-democratic leanings, surged to a second-place finish in the country’s European Parliament vote in June.

Although that vote was largely symbolic, as the European legislative body wields relatively little power compared with the national parliaments of European Union member states, it was nonetheless seen as a wake-up call signaling anger against centrist governments and mainstream parties.

That anger was crystallized by the Aug. 23 knife attack at a festival in the western town of Solingen, which left three people dead and eight others injured. The 26-year-old suspect, who had entered the country as an asylum seeker, had been under a deportation order since last year.

And a claim of responsibility from the extremist group Islamic State raised fears of a potential new wave of terrorist attacks in Europe.

Two people stand facing a display of flowers and candles

Analysts said the episode played into the far-right agenda of depicting immigrants as dangerously violent and the government as complacent in the face of a potent threat — an echo of U.S. political discourse in this presidential campaign season.

“My hunch is that AfD will do even better than expected now after the Solingen attack,” said Sabine Volk, a political science researcher at the University of Passau.

Scholz’s center-left party supports the right to seek asylum — a contrast with AfD, whose national leaders have called for a total halt to all immigration — but the chancellor said after the Solingen attack that irregular migration must be more tightly controlled, and deportations carried out faster when asylum claims are denied.

Analysts predict the immigration issue will continue to drive a wedge.

“Established parties need to address concerns about immigration or else the far-right [parties] have a monopoly on them,” Katja Hoyer, an author and scholar of the former communist East Germany, wrote on the social platform X.

The upcoming votes underscore a persistent sense of political grievance and alienation in the country’s east, nearly 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A recent poll by the German economic institute IW said one-fifth of easterners felt left behind economically, even though financial statistics suggest their region has been closing the gap with the richer west.

That helps fuel voter support for populist parties, whether those on the far right, such as AfD, or the far left, such as the Reason and Justice party, known by its German initials BSW, which is also expected to do very well in the upcoming state elections.

Even if it wins the biggest share in the upcoming votes, the AfD is unlikely to capture a majority. It would need support from another party or more to form a ruling legislative coalition, but so far, others have balked at allying with it.

Among the party faithful, though, feelings of resentment remain — and grow.

“Lots of things that were promised to eastern Germans were not successful,” said the analyst Wurthmann. “And if you look at the influence of the Soviet times, some in the east have not entirely accepted democratic values.”

Courts and German law enforcement authorities have cited precisely that — the undermining of democratic values, the use of hateful rhetoric — in formally designating the AfD as a suspected extremist organization.

Many Germans shudder at the party’s reintroduction, even in oblique fashion, of banned speech and symbols associated with the Nazi era.

In July, a German court found Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the AfD in Thuringia, guilty of using a Nazi slogan. He uttered only part of the phrase in question — “Everything for Germany!’ — but was found to have encouraged a rally crowd to complete it.

It was his second such offense, and the penalty was a fine.