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It was overwhelmingly young people who voted for the controversial AfD party in Thuringia, but what attracted them?
What does a Nazi look like in 2024? Is it the slender waitress with the nose piercing? The dapper pensioner in his checked shirt and neatly pressed chinos? Those students sitting on that bench beneath the benign gaze of the Goethe-Schiller monument?
“Calling us Nazis is just a cheap slur. There is nothing wrong about wanting our country back – Germany for the Germans,” says Harald, the pensioner (and, to a greater or lesser degree, the waitress and the students).
“We have too many foreigners. We need to send them all home and become more self-reliant,” he adds.
A week ago, the results of local state elections in Thuringia, in the Eastern part of the country, sent shockwaves across Europe and beyond, with a far-Right party winning a German state election for the first time since the Second World War.
The extreme right wing AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) party captured nearly 33 per cent of the vote, and came second in the nearby state of Saxony with almost 31 per cent.
What terrified Berlin most was that these were not disillusioned old people hankering back to their totalitarian DDR past, but overwhelmingly young people, demanding a future free of multiculturalism and an immediate end to military support for Ukraine.
A staggering 37 per cent of young voters in Thuringia voted for the pro-Russia AfD. In Saxony, it was 31 per cent. Yet, such a vote did not come from nowhere; in the European parliamentary elections in June, the AfD beat all three parties of Olaf Scholz’s coalition in the 16-24 vote, coming second with 16 per cent – just one percentage point behind the conservatives.
“Our country cannot and must not get used to this,” Scholz said earlier this week when the count ended. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.”
And so I have come to Thuringia, to see for myself just who voted for a party that is routinely compared to the National Socialists and to ask why they are so in the thrall of its local firebrand – a man likened by many to Adolf Hitler.
“It is time Germany had a strong leader again,” says Mia, 20. “Traditional politics and the same old politicians have let us down. The AfD is all over social media and TikTok. It understands young people and it’s offering solutions to real world problems – like getting rid of those people who don’t belong here.”
A familiar enough mantra everywhere – but in the context of Germany’s horrifying genocidal past, when six million Jews and millions of others were murdered on the grounds of their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexuality in the repugnant pursuit of racial purity, these words have a chilling ring to them.
The head of the AfD in Thuringia is Björn Höcke, a former teacher from western Germany turned charismatic political operator. Earlier this year, a German court found Höcke guilty of knowingly using the phrase “Everything for Germany” in speeches – a motto engraved on the daggers of the SA stormtroopers, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing.
In 2019, another judge ruled that it would not be libellous to call Höcke a “fascist”. But he remains unrepentant. A rabble rouser – whom academics have likened to Goebbels in his speeches – he knows how to work a crowd and appears at rallies every week doing just that. One of his slogans is “Schreib’ Geschichte!” or “Write history!”.
With one set of elections ending in victory, another is set for later in the month in the eastern state of Brandenburg. Promising an equally high share of votes, history is already in the making.
Over several days, I travelled across this region speaking to people. From the pretty honeypot capital Erfurt, with its 14th century hilltop cathedral, half-timbered houses and metropolitan mix of restaurants, where residents are appalled by the outcome of the election, to the bleak featureless town of Nordhausen, a city bombed by the British in 1945 and soullessly rebuilt by the socialist DDR regime, where the AfD has a stronghold.
In Erfurt, Maximilian Semsch, a writer and a vocal opponent of AfD said: “I think much of the xenophobia goes back to 2015 when Chancellor Angela Merkel accepted more than one million asylum seekers into Germany. It was the humane thing to do and was meant in a spirit of goodwill but with hindsight I would say that certainly in the east of Germany it caused genuine angst.”
Tobias Uhlig, walking with his dog, Humboldt, added: “It’s shameful that the AfD received so many votes. I can believe how stupid people are; the party is making promises it can’t deliver. We couldn’t function without migrant workers; I rely heavily on carers and without them I don’t know what would happen to me.”
Over in Nordhausen, a housewife – who declined to be named – told me: “Every Monday there is an AfD rally here and it scares me. There is loud chanting and men with big dogs patrol the area. There is a genuine sense of menace about this party, which I worry about. Here in the east, life is quiet and for young people it is dull – the AfD capitalises on that by making them feel they belong and have a purpose.”
Then, on to the cultural gem of Weimar, a place of high art, creativity and enlightenment, which was once home of the inter-war Weimar Republic – the nation’s first experiment in democracy, founded in 1918. It lasted just 15 years before the Nazis came to power.
Here, too, there are weekly AfD demonstrations, accompanied by counter-demonstrations. Victory in local elections is not enough. Despite winning a third of seats in Thuringia’s legislature, the AfD won’t get into power, as the other parties have said they will refuse to work with them to form a governing majority.
This has fuelled a sense of outrage among its activists and voters, providing further proof that more than three decades after reunification, those who live in former East Germany are still perceived as second class citizens whose views don’t matter.
“Whatever the mainstream parties say, the East is treated differently. Our economy lags far behind the West; there’s less investment, lower pay and while we struggle to get by, waves of illegal immigrants come and live off handouts. Bureaucracy is crippling us and all that causes huge tensions,” said Paul, a student who voted for the AfD.
“The AfD deliberately scapegoats immigrants and that is dangerous – but so is ignoring the wishes of the 12 million people who live here.”
In truth, over the past two years, the economies of the eastern states have been growing faster than those in the west, as global players such as Tesla and Intel have set up factories there.
Ironically, one of the issues holding back further investment is a lack of skilled migrants. As for “waves” of immigrants, levels of immigration in Eastern Germany are among the lowest in the entire country.
But crimes such as last month’s mass stabbing attack in the Western city of Solingen, where three people were killed and another injured by a Syrian man believed to be a member of Islamic State, bolster a siege mentality.
Allied to a persistent sense of inferiority, along with a growing impetus to assert a distinctly eastern German identity, it prepares fertile ground for the AfD.
“Racism and right-wing extremism just aren’t as much of a taboo in the east, and there’s a different relationship to freedom of speech,” is the verdict of anti-racist campaigner David Begrich.
“Students in the school projects I do often say to me: ‘I think Adolf Hitler was a great politician – he built the autobahn and gave many workers money and work – that’s my opinion, and we live in a free country and so I can express it’.”
The regional dimension to the triumph of the AfD cannot be dismissed. Nevertheless, these poll results are being seen as a litmus test ahead of Germany’s federal elections in 2025.
Commentators remain convinced this right wing youthquake won’t spread west. But it was in the Thuringian state election of 1930 that the Nazi Party had its first success. The AfD say they want to write history, yet it increasingly looks as though they want to repeat it.