The most feared man in German politics cleared his throat and took a sip of water as his audience hushed in anticipation, their mobile phones aloft and set to record. “I’ve got to protect my voice for my first speech as state premier,” Björn Höcke said with a grin. The crowd went wild.
Three eastern German states hold elections next month and, by a quirk of the calendar, the regions up for grabs are among those with the most supporters of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. If the polls are accurate, the AfD could wind up the strongest party in all three, a year before the planned date of Germany’s next general election. Depending on who you ask, it would be a political earthquake, a catastrophe or a wake-up call for the country.
The strength of the AfD and a new populist upstart, the “leftwing conservative” Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), underlines dovetailing trends in Europe’s top economy: mounting frustration with incumbents, anxiety about Germany’s military support for Ukraine and festering divisions between east and west more than three decades after reunification.
Höcke, 52, co-heads the state chapter of the AfD in Thuringia, which will vote on 1 September along with Saxony. The AfD, polling at about 30%, has been classed as “confirmed rightwing extremist” by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the domestic security watchdog, in both states. Brandenburg, the largely rural state surrounding Berlin, will hold its election on 22 September. Its AfD chapter is listed as “suspected rightwing extremist”.
Two national magazines splashed the face of Höcke, a trim, grey-haired former history and sports teacher, across their covers this month. Der Spiegel ran his image, along with those of France’s Marine Le Pen and US presidential hopeful Donald Trump, with the tagline: “How fascism begins”. Stern had Höcke staring into the camera, his scowl covered with the words: “Who votes for this man?”
Höcke has belonged to the AfD since it was launched in 2013 as a Eurosceptic party. He is seen as the driving force of its ever-stronger embrace of radical anti-migrant, anti-Islam sentiment, as he calls into question the foundations of Germany’s democratic order and postwar penance for the Holocaust.
It is the performance of his state that will be watched most closely in Germany, which has long prided itself on consensus-oriented politics and having learned the lessons of the Nazi past, when the results trickle in on election night.
With Thuringian pork sausages sizzling on the grill and frothy pints flowing in a pop-up biergarten in the state capital, Erfurt, Höcke basked in the bullish mood at his rally.
On a small square framed by communist-era housing blocks, about 800 people appeared rapt as he railed against the government in Berlin and the justice authorities who had repeatedly filed charges against him for incitement. Höcke, who grew up in West Germany, mockingly calls the constitutional protection office the “Stasi”.
Children with their parents clutched strings of AfD-blue helium balloons while older men in socks and sandals stand for Höcke’s speech with plastic flyswatters bearing the party logo tucked under their arms.
A few hundred counter-protesters rhythmically shouted a rhyme from the sidelines behind a police cordon: “Höcke ist/ein Faschist” (Höcke is a fascist). He dismissed the demonstrators, whose whistles and jeering could be heard above the large sound system, as “filled with self-hatred” and “needing therapy”.
Höcke said to applause that leftist NGOs mobilising against the far right hated Germany and hailed action taken by Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to crack down on progressive groups as an effective model.
Looking like a tech executive in a smart shirt, his sleeves rolled up in the summer heat, Höcke appeared slightly out of step with his largely working-class audience as he compared Germany’s mainstream parties to a cartel with a monopolistic stranglehold on the democratic “market”.
But he had supporters in thrall to him when he intoned the key talking point of the movement, that the centre-left-led government in Berlin wants to “do away with you, the German people” and “replace you with a multicultural society”.
Höcke’s supporters gathered in Erfurt repeatedly said their top concern was not Germany’s anaemic economic growth or the inflated cost of living but “criminal foreigners” in their midst. “I have nothing against foreigners – my wife is from Indonesia and my daughter’s boyfriend is from Sri Lanka,” said Christof Meiering, 62, who retired from a job in IT. “But when foreigners become criminal they have to be deported, and quickly.”
“It wasn’t easy in the GDR but we were safe,” said sales clerk Manuela, 44, accompanied by her 14-year-old daughter Lea, referring to life under communism. She said she was worried about Lea on Erfurt’s streets and at school. “Everyone thinks that the AfD hates foreigners – that’s not true. They can do what they want as long as they integrate, behave themselves and pay their own way.”
In Germany’s fractured electoral landscape, an outright majority is exceedingly rare, meaning that leading parties must usually form coalitions to govern. The system was specifically designed in the postwar period to make it difficult for an extremist fringe to gain power.
All of the democratic parties have maintained a “firewall” against the AfD, vowing never to join forces with it – a policy that has so far kept the far right out of government at the state and federal level.
André Brodocz, a political scientist at the University of Erfurt, said he expected the blockade to hold but that an AfD sweep in the state elections would palpably shift the centre of gravity in German politics on contentious issues including migration, Ukraine and the “green” energy transformation. “Other parties will try to occupy the issues and positions of the AfD to conquer its voters” in the run-up to next September’s general election, he said.
The traditional parties have proved incapable of winning back a swath of voters, particularly in the east, where they have gone from considering the AfD a protest party to giving its increasingly radical stances their full allegiance in election after election.
“The other parties are totally unprepared to address that spread of rightwing extremist political views,” Brodocz said.
Meanwhile the BSW party, whose firebrand leader Wagenknecht is, like the AfD, highly critical of migration, Nato, the US and aid to Ukraine, is polling in the double digits in all three states. Her seven-month-old party has been billed an “alternative to the Alternative” for voters – and potential coalition partners – who see the AfD as too extremist.
Its own positions on many pivotal issues are so vague that the national daily Süddeutsche Zeitung called it a “black box” whose contents remained sealed and mysterious.
Mathematically, it is possible that the BSW will be an essential component in the ruling coalitions of all three states, however ideologically awkward. In the elections for the European parliament in June it stole voters from across the party spectrum.
The party’s candidate in Thuringia, Katja Wolf, said she sensed “fear of the AfD wherever you go in the state” and that the BSW was responding to the spread of “hate” by directly addressing the enduring disappointment and alienation of easterners.
“The promise [after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989] was you’ll be better off than before,” she said. “And in material terms, they were right.” But she said lasting inequality with the west, a sense that rural regions were “cut off” without access to local doctors, schools and public transport, plus demographic shifts taking a bite out of property values, left many citizens feeling cheated. Add to that the soaring cost of energy since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and an influx of more than a million Ukrainian refugees into Germany.
“This is a war for which Thuringians are not responsible but they are bearing the brunt of it here,” she said, echoing the sentiments of many easterners who question Germany’s role as the top European weapons supplier to Ukraine and wonder how long vast, nuclear-armed Russia can be treated as a pariah.
A poll this month for the independent Allensbach Institute found stark differences of perspective between east and west. More than half of easterners – 53% – said Germany should “try to build up and strengthen ties with Russia”, versus 25% in the west.
In the east, 54% of voters said they agreed with the statement: “We only seem to be living in a democracy, in reality citizens don’t have a say,” while just 27% in the west shared that view.
Bodo Ramelow, of the far-left Linke party, who has governed Thuringia for a decade, admitted that he was part of the “establishment” as stiff political winds blew against the system. He said he refused to “insult AfD voters as fascists” and was fighting for every vote against the far right. “The 30% [support for the AfD] defines the state but I’m talking about the 70% and it has to grow,” he said. “I’m fighting against the normalisation of fascism.
