Turnout in Saxony-Anhalt was particularly high at 76.7%, with AfD supporters in Magdeburg praising Siegmund’s success in winning over voters. A man named Ollie said: “This man gives us what no one else can.” is not going well: “Things have to improve for us, for my family; I have three children. I am afraid, I am really afraid that security will be increasingly eroded.” Other parties refuse to form a coalition with the AfD, operating a Brandmauer or firewall intended to keep the far right out of the government. In Saxony-Anhalt, the BSW has offered to cooperate with the AfD on some issues if it manages to enter the state parliament. The AfD leads national opinion polls, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s ruling conservatives and the Social Democrats, but its heart lies in the eastern states. They also won the 2024 state election in neighboring Thuringia, but failed to win enough seats to win power. Among the AfD’s policies is a highly controversial plan for “remigration,” which is widely understood to mean mass deportations of immigrants, although the party says it refers to the deportation of criminals and those in the country illegally. He could accomplish neither if he ran the government of one of the 16 states, but he would have significant local powers. The party has been particularly critical of the Bauhaus design school that the Nazis closed in the Saxony-Anhalt city of Dessau after they came to power in 1933. The AfD has called it “the dead end of modernism,” leading some to accuse the party of using language similar to that of the Nazis. Nikita, a protester at an anti-AfD “Festival of Democracy” in Magdeburg on the eve of the vote said Germans “Learn from our history and don’t go back. We don’t want dark times anymore.” Responding to the news from Saxony-Anhalt, the veteran head of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria, Charlotte Knobloch, said she was scared. “On days like this it is already difficult for me to recognize my homeland,” said the 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, calling on the traditional parties not to remain impassive and allow “this decline.” One of the AfD’s leading figures in Saxony-Anhalt, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, has also been criticized for his attitude towards Russia. When asked why he had a Russian army mug in his office, he said it was just a souvenir and “it’s not our war.”
