Germany’s flyover country takes its revenge

‘Handel was from Halle,’ the German comic folk musician Rainald Grebe once sang, ‘from Dessau there was Kurt Weill – it was, was, was once in style … that’s how Saxony-Anhalt is’.

This east-central German state is a chimerical administrative unit cobbled together from a handful of adjacent territories. Its origins date to the country’s reunification in 1990, combining the old duchy of Anhalt and various antique bishoprics and microstates with odds and ends that Prussia had stripped away from Saxony after the Napoleonic Wars.

If Saxony-Anhalt were in North America, it would be classic flyover country. For most Germans, it is a place you drive through en route to somewhere more exciting, at most taking a brief detour off the A2 autobahn to gawk at Magdeburg cathedral or wolf down a sandwich in the shadow of Stendal’s red-brick gothic Rathaus.

As Grebe put it: ‘Saxony-Anhalt – my grandfather died happy, and he was never there.’

Now, though, like so many neglected and patronised districts across the western world, it has taken its democratic vengeance.

At its state parliament election on 6 September, the radical right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party took 43.8 per cent of the vote and 39 of the 83 seats, three short of an absolute majority. The previously dominant Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany’s main conservative party, slumped to 17.2 per cent. Both numbers require a little context. The AfD, which was founded in 2013 to protest the use of German taxpayers’ money to bail out struggling Mediterranean economies, is not like most other parties of Europe’s populist right.

It has never really been through a process of cosmetic ‘normalisation’, like the dédiabolisation of the National Rally in France or the purging of neo-Nazi elements from the Sweden Democrats. On the contrary, it has been through several cycles of compound radicalisation. The manifesto it put forward in Saxony-Anhalt was perhaps its most extreme yet, with pledges to segregate disabled children and refugees from schools, imprison teenagers for even the mildest of crimes, and set up citizens’ militias to help the police keep watch over migrants.

This region was one of the AfD’s first heartlands. As early as the March 2016 state election, just when the scale and complexity of the European migration crisis was beginning to dawn on the German public, it surged into second place, with 24.3 per cent of the vote, barely five points behind the CDU.

Five years later, the pollsters suggested the AfD was neck and neck with the CDU and within touching distance of its first serious electoral breakthrough. They were utterly wrong: on the day itself, the over-60s turned out en masse to hand a stonking 16-point victory to the CDU and the ‘state father’ Reiner Haseloff, Saxony-Anhalt’s avuncular chief minister.

This time, the AfD has beaten the CDU to a pulp. It has trumped its previous record vote share at a regional election – the 32.5 per cent it won next door in Thuringia two years ago – by more than 11 points. It has more than halved support for the conservatives.

It has done so despite abundant local evidence of right-wing extremism in the ranks: a state leader who appeared to display the Hitler salute over a kneeling comrade (he says he was satirically bestowing a knighthood); senior staff who organised camps for a successor to the Hitler Youth; and a lead manifesto author who once claimed that the Jews were instrumentalising Islam to ‘weaken German culture’ and ‘bring about the abolition of our people’.

Among the divers alarums that followed the result, much attention has quite reasonably been paid to its implications for Friedrich Merz, the CDU chancellor, for the future of his party and for the survival of postwar Germany’s peculiar brand of liberal democracy. It is also important to try and understand why the AfD did so well here and now, in Saxony-Anhalt. Some of the reasons are readily apparent. The AfD’s lead candidate, a 35-year-old erstwhile ‘olfactory neuromarketer’ called Ulrich Siegmund, is an undeniably charming man with a terrific flair for TikTok and stump speeches.

He had the good fortune to be running against Sven Schulze, a veteran CDU politician who had succeeded Haseloff not because he had any noteworthy abilities but simply because it was Buggins’ turn to have a go. Siegmund had the even greater stroke of luck that Merz and his ruling coalition in Berlin have roughly the same favourability ratings as insect burgers, AI managers in the workplace and the total abolition of cash (all between 10 and 15 per cent).

There are, however, deeper structural factors. One is economic and another is demographic. Even in comparison to other parts of what used to be the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), Saxony-Anhalt had a rough ride during the years after reunification. As its uncompetitive chemicals, coal mining and heavy machinery sectors were cut to the bone, the unemployment rate peaked at 25 per cent and stayed sticky well into the 2000s. It remains a couple of points higher than the east German average.

Its GDP per capita has more than doubled in real terms, but remains conspicuously stuck behind the levels in neighbouring states such as Saxony and Brandenburg. It contracted by 0.2 per cent last year. Saxony-Anhalt is doing a lot better than it was, but not as well as its peers. Most of its voters are worried about their personal finances.

More importantly, it has lost a quarter of its people since 1990, a far higher proportion than any other region of Germany. The number of residents in Wolfen-Nord, an estate of prefabricated concrete Plattenbau tower blocks built by the GDR to house workers in the nearby chemical plants of Bitterfeld, has fallen from 35,000 to 6,000.

A few miles to the west, the copper mines in the Mansfeld-Südharz district, which had been operating since the Bronze Age, have been shut down. The local population dropped by more than 40 per cent and the area now has one of the highest median ages found anywhere in Europe, at 50.6 years.

This tangible decline is interlaced with a complex set of feelings about identity. Unlike Thuringia, Saxony or Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt does not have much of a distinctive and cohesive shared history.

That leads its towns and cities to cleave all the more tightly to ‘local patriotism’, cherishing their painstakingly restored medieval centres and their connections to long-dead Holy Roman emperors or luminaries of classical German culture such as Nietzsche (from Naumburg), the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (Quedlinburg) and Martin Luther (Eisleben and Wittenberg).

The fall of the Berlin Wall is widely perceived as a rupture of ambivalent significance. On the one hand, the little-loved GDR regime provides the AfD with a handy bogeyman and historical template for what it characterises as the imminent ‘dictatorship of the old parties’, which supposedly wishes to subjugate the citizenry with a similarly clunking ideological zeal.

On the other, people in Saxony-Anhalt who lived through the end of the GDR often complain of ‘biographical erasure’, the sense that reunification swept away and devalued their past lives. Many in the generations below them feel starved of respect and representation.

The polls showed that 73 per cent of the state’s electorate thought east Germans were ‘still in many respects second-class citizens’. Only 47 per cent said reunification had, overall, been a success, while 50 per cent thought the federal government prioritised west Germans and 43 per cent agreed that the AfD ‘ensures that we east Germans can once again be proud of our achievements’.

The word ‘identity’ appears 33 times in the AfD’s state manifesto. Germany’s, it says, has been hollowed out by an ‘artificially sustained’ fixation on guilt, multiculturalism and plastic hyperliberalism, and must be ‘healed through a new, patriotic policy’ in schools, universities, museums and arts institutions, concentrating on a supposed golden age from national unification in 1871 to the downfall of the Weimar Republic in 1933. The Germans must be brought back to themselves, as Siegmund put it in his victory speech on the night of the election.

That message, as much as anything else, appears to have filled a kind of political void, enthusing vast numbers of people who had previously given up on voting, and helping to drive turnout up to 77.8 per cent, the highest level on record. The other political parties have put down unusually shallow roots in Saxony-Anhalt, leaving an electorate with highly fissile loyalties. The AfD, by contrast, has woven itself into the fabric of local life, especially in the countryside. Unlike its rivals, it dependably shows up to village barbecues and fundraisers for the volunteer fire brigade.

The parallels that are frequently drawn between the AfD and the Nazi Party generally obscure more than they illuminate, but some of these dynamics do have a disconcerting precedent.

In April 1932 the free state of Anhalt, socially fragmented and devastated by the Great Depression, held a regional election. The Nazis, promising national renewal and a culture war against ‘decadent’ and Marxist elites, won 41 per cent of the vote. Ultimately, the local conservatives folded and helped Hitler to appoint his party’s first chief minister. Nine months later, he seized absolute power.

Tilo Jung, a celebrity podcaster, asked about this episode at an AfD press conference the morning after the vote in Saxony-Anhalt. Siegmund was indignant, seemingly caught off guard. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, that you would engage in such bizarre comparisons, that you would even research something like that,’ he spluttered.

History is clearly not about to repeat itself with any great precision. But it is worth bearing in mind.