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HALLE AN DER SAALE, Germany — There’s one German regional election left before the entire country goes to the polls — and it’s spelling trouble for Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
Ahead of Sunday’s vote in Saxony-Anhalt, her Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) are polling neck-and-neck, with one recent poll even putting the far-right party in first place.
The AfD is strong in the eastern German state, commanding the support of almost a quarter of voters. But that’s more or less the share of the ballots they won in 2016. Rather than a far-right surge, it’s above all the weakness of the Christian Democrats that could see the AfD clinch victory on Sunday.
The conservatives have dipped in the polls nationwide amid growing discontent over the government’s pandemic management, a series of corruption scandals and the hotly contested election of Armin Laschet as the party’s candidate to succeed Merkel.
In Saxony-Anhalt, approval rates of the Christian Democrat-led regional government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis came crashing down from 72 percent in June 2020 to 31 percent this spring, and the local party branch had openly supported Laschet’s rival.
An AfD win would deal a devastating blow not only to the party — less than four months ahead of the federal election — but also Laschet, who insisted on Tuesday that the far right wasn’t breathing down his neck specifically, but “down the neck of every democrat.”
“We cannot want a far-right radical party to become the strongest party in a German regional parliament,” he added. “What happens on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt is a matter that should concern all democrats.”
Eastern stigma
The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt leans far-right even for that party’s standards. Its parliamentary leader, Oliver Kirchner, was a member of the so-called Flügel, an internal party grouping that was disbanded after Germany’s domestic security service declared it a “proven extremist endeavour.” The local branch, like the federal AfD, has been classified as a “suspected case” of extremism.
The success of the AfD in former East Germany last week prompted Christian Democrat politician Marco Wanderwitz, the government’s special commissioner for the eastern states, to say that a certain share of east Germans was just past hope when it comes to democratic values.
“We are dealing with people who, in some cases, have been socialized in a dictatorship in such a way that they have not arrived in democracy even after 30 years,” and only a few were “potentially recoverable,” Wanderwitz — himself an east German — said in comments on a podcast last Friday, which drew fierce criticism.
Merkel, who grew up in the German Democratic Republic, contradicted Wanderwitz on Wednesday, and Saxony-Anhalt’s incumbent state premier Reiner Haseloff said that one-sided press coverage was the reason why many Germans were unaware of how the east had improved.
Statements like Wanderwitz’s are usually met with anger from east Germans, who feel suggestions that they aren’t properly integrated into the federal republic are entrenching deep-seated stigmas.
“When I’m in the west and people ask me if I come from ‘the zone,’” — a reference to the Soviet Occupation Zone — “I tell them ‘that’s enough!’ as I can get really, really angry,” said Elfriede Kiesewetter, a retiree from Leipzig who had come to Halle’s main square to run some errands. “It makes me sad that I still encounter prejudices today because I think we’re all Germans,” she added.
Kiesewetter, who said she hadn’t made up her mind about which party to vote for, laid the blame for the region’s troubles at the feet of the chancellor. “I love this country, but I don’t like Merkel — nobody here likes her, she forgot about us.”
On the campaign trail ahead of the 2017 election, Merkel was met with verbal abuse from angry citizens across east Germany on several occasions. But the Christian Democrats are still popular among many voters.
The Greens, flying high in federal polls, have struggled to make inroads in eastern states — although the party stands to double its share of the vote to 10 percent in Saxony-Anhalt — while the Social Democrats have been in decline since the late 1990s. The leftist Die Linke, also popular across the former East, has suffered a drop in support and found itself in a race for third place.
“I will vote for [Christian Democrat premier] Haseloff, although he will probably team up with the Greens again,” said Halle resident Stefan Ebert, while enjoying a day in the sun with his daughter outside Moritzburg Castle in the historic city center. (The current regional government consists of the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats and the Greens.)
Too young to remember the days before the Iron Curtain came down, Ebert said he was well aware of how poor everyone was in the 1990s and the improvements since, for the most part under CDU rule.
“I appreciate that, but what has happened with migration in recent years is too much,” he added. “It’s also about her — I want her to grow up in a safe environment,” he said, pointing at his daughter.
Extremism problem
Others are more fearful of far-right extremists. In 2019, an attack on Halle’s synagogue on Yom Kippur left two people dead, sending shockwaves through Germany and across the world.
Eastern states have struggled with neo-Nazi violence long before the AfD rose in the polls, fueled by factors such as economic hardship, demographic change and mobilization efforts of west German neo-Nazis after 1990 as well as the communist regime’s unwillingness to acknowledge that neo-Nazis existed in the supposedly antifascist GDR.
“Saxony-Anhalt has problems due to the structural breaks of the last decades, especially the collapse of east German industry,” said Michael Böcher, professor of political science at the University of Magdeburg, the state capital of Saxony-Anhalt. “The state is relatively economically weak, as there are few large companies that settle here.”
Economic and demographic challenges — Saxony-Anhalt, for example, has lost nearly a quarter of its population to people migrating to western Germany since 1990 — could combine into a perception of hopelessness, making far-right movements more appealing for some, Böcher said, while cautioning that such problems were by no means limited to eastern states.
Karamba Diaby, a Social Democrat member of the federal parliament for Halle and the first Black German MP, also insisted that the far right was in the minority in Saxony-Anhalt. In 2020, Diaby’s office in Halle was damaged in an attack whose motivation remains unsolved but is believed to be connected to racism and far-right extremism.
“Obviously, there is a small group of people who are very loud and present. But they are not the majority in this society — also not the majority in Halle an der Saale. Therefore, we must not let ourselves be intimidated, but will continue to do our work,” he said.
He also disagreed with Wanderwitz’s suggestion that some east Germans are irrevocably lost to democratic politics: “I think it’s the wrong way to simply give up on an entire generation now.”
Trouble ahead?
Should the AfD win on Sunday, its victory — albeit significant — will likely be largely symbolic. The Christian Democrat leadership has repeatedly ruled out any coalition with the far-right party.
Haseloff has issued similar statements. But other Saxony-Anhalt conservatives have previously shown themselves open to the idea of cooperating with the far right.
Such a move would collapse the cordon sanitaire Germany’s mainstream parties have so far kept up around the AfD and allow the party to wield real power for the first time.
Any step in that direction would also turn into a major headache for Laschet and the federal Christian Democrats; his predecessor as party chief, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, was forced to resign when the Thuringia conservatives unexpectedly elected a state premier with the support of the AfD last year.
As Thuringia’s conservative parliamentary leader Mario Voigt put it last month: “Elections won’t be won in the east. They can, however, be lost in the east.”
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