Given that all of Eastern Germany voted for AfD in the 2025 national parliamentary election, it is not a big surprise they took Saxony-Anhalt. I suppose it is the sheer size of their majority that shocked poll watchers as this was supposed to be a close election. It had been close the last time but the CDU won and was able to form a majority state government. Now, they can only hope no one is willing to form a coalition with the ultra right-wing party and that they will able to form a government with the minority place holders.
It might be time to consider moving the capitol of Germany back to Bonn if this pattern holds up. For whatever reasons of their own, East Germans are pining for the days before the Berlin Wall came down, with AfD local party leader, Ulrich Siegmund, riding around on an old East German Schwalbe moped. This imagery really seemed to appeal to voters, who have some sort of misplaced nostalgia for life under the iron curtain.
The Soviet Union had cleaved off the northeastern corner of Germany in 1949 to create a puppet state like they had throughout Eastern Europe, using fake elections to make it all seem legitimate. Maybe those elections weren't so fake in retrospect? Maybe some Germans hungered for a social democratic state based on the Soviet model? I would think that decades of living in the shadow of West Germany, unable to enjoy its riches, except through black markets, they would want to leave that lost world permanently behind.
This must be very perplexing for the rational West German who thought this issue was made moot when Angela Merkel rose to become Chancellor, herself an East German. Yet, for some reason here we go again.
It didn't help painting the AfD, or Alternative for Deutschland, as they like to be called, as an extremist organization. Yes, that's what they are, with funding not only from Moscow but from American tech barons as well. The German media should have learned from the 2024 US Elections that you need to tread softly when labeling groups that have such a strong groundswell of support. Better to expose their unscrupulous nature, as the British press is currently doing with Nigel Farage's Reform Party.
It is hard to call AfD extremist when its national party leader is herself a lesbian and makes no secret about it. This apparent display of openness has gone a long way toward softening their brand, so that voters no longer are quite so repelled by them. Needless to say that if the AfD were able to take over the Reichstag, persons like Alice would be thrown to the wayside, but for the meantime she is useful.
The weird part is that Alice is West German and grew up with all the privileges of West German society, but at some point decided to make her bed with the AfD. She supposedly represents the more moderate Alternative Mitte or center faction of the party, but nevertheless is AfD and proud of it.
She's young, well-spoken and to a certain degree charismatic, which offers her as a sharp contrast to the mundane Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democrats. Siegmund is even younger and more dashing, too young to know what it was like living under Erich Honecker when Saxony-Alhund was part of East Germany. It's the nostalgia he seems to crave like so many Millennials. Those old Schwalbes are pretty cool.
It seems a large part of this frustration being expressed is that the CDU hasn't done enough to make Germany affordable and that there are too many foreigners taking advantage of the vaunted German social welfare system, particularly Ukrainians, which the AfD has singled out as little more than panhandlers milking their refugee status in Germany. There are an estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian citizens currently residing in Germany. If you look at this map, you will see there is a pretty high concentration of Ukrainians living in the northern most part of Eastern Germany, and of course quite a few in Berlin.
This points to the direct involvement of Moscow in these elections. Not only is the Kremlin funding the AfD but is helping to set its agenda. It wants to make life miserable for Ukraine both inside and outside their country. Most of these persons fled to Germany and other European countries after the Russian invasion in 2022. Not that they place a particular burden on these countries, rather they fill many of the jobs Germans don't want to do, even East Germans.
So, why the fuss? Much of it is probably due to the Ukrainians clustering together and forming ethnic communities as immigrants are prone to do. They take over neighborhoods that may have belonged to East Germans, breeding resentment. They don't make much effort to learn the language, more resentment. They probably aren't as clean as Germans when it comes to obeying all those signage rules on trash cans. Or maybe it is just the fact they are Slavic and we all know how Germans feel about Slavs.
This is a country that considers itself pure as the driven snow. They even have "purity laws," not just for beer, which they value most highly, but what it means to be German. This piousness, if I can use this word, is very annoying and sometimes it gets to the point where you just laugh, especially seeing these old Germans in Lederhosen. More than that, they consider themself the heirs to Kant, Hegel and a host of other philosophical giants that of course you can only read in German to understand. Maybe the AfD has broken through all this smugness and offered an alternative. I don't know and I wouldn't care if it didn't have such a deep impact on Europe as a whole.
You can bet the AfD would push for Germany's exit from the EU, especially since its banks largely underwrite it, and with it the entire social welfare system underpinning the EU would crumble. So, this is pretty serious stuff. We can't take this state election lightly even if it was pretty much a foregone conclusion given what we saw in last year's nationwide elections. The AfD is definitely on the ascendency and the other political parties have to do more to attract voters, otherwise we could see a Fourth Reich in the not so distant future.
One hopes Germans will come to their senses before then. It's one thing to ride around on a rebuilt Schwalbe and another to have that as your only means of transportation. Things were pretty rough in East Germany as they were throughout the Soviet Imperium. By the 1980s most persons living under the Soviet shadow couldn't even afford a moped and by 1989 where selling everything they had at open air markets just to cover expenses. This is not a time you want to go back to.
We'll see what happens.
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