AfD leads Saxony-Anhalt election, could win first state government since WWII

Siegmund’s TikTok following approaches half of Saxony-Anhalt’s eligible voters

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) holds a comfortable lead in Saxony-Anhalt state polls ahead of Sunday’s vote, with a victory by its candidate making the AfD the first far-right party to lead a German state government since World War II, according to NPR correspondent Esme Nicholson, reporting from Halle.

The AfD’s candidate Ulrich Siegmund, 35, has built his campaign almost entirely around TikTok. He has accumulated nearly half as many followers on the platform as Saxony-Anhalt has eligible voters, and he personally answers their questions in videos filmed from his back porch. In each clip, he wears a flawlessly ironed white polo shirt or starched white dress shirt — what Nicholson described as the visual uniform of Germany’s “newly professionalized far-right.”

Siegmund’s broad smile and carefully coiffed side-parting distinguish him from other AfD figures, who “tend to grimace rather than grin,” Nicholson reported. Yet the same affable politician holds hard-right positions typical of his party’s most contentious views on European politics. The AfD’s platform backs what the party calls “remigration” and asserts that “culturally foreign” health workers often fail to meet German medical standards and “endanger patient well-being.”

In a recent TikTok post, Siegmund argued that it is “unacceptable that our doctors are leaving for Switzerland, Norway, or elsewhere because they cannot tolerate the conditions here, while we bring in doctors from India or other places to replace them.” On camera, Siegmund refrains from going into such detail, keeping his campaign speeches snappy and full of pep talk rather than policy.

The party’s harder edges surface at its rallies. There, former AfD supporter Hannes Kreschel now attends AfD election events to talk to voters on camera. The 23-year-old law student said he voted for the AfD in the past to stick it to those in power, then changed his mind after reading the platform. “I figured out that this is not the country I would like to live in,” Kreschel said, citing the AfD’s anti-immigration, nationalist vision. “I would like to live in an open country which is friendly and not full of hate.”

At one rally, Kreschel said, some attendees tried to silence him. “They try to hit the microphone and they try to hit me,” he said. “Of course we’re confronting them with facts, but I try to be nice because I think you should separate the people from their talking points.” Kreschel posts the exchanges on his own channels, which he said are popular but do not match Siegmund’s reach.

Other voters in Halle see less hate in the AfD’s appeal. At a market stall on the city’s main square, 49-year-old aviation engineer Alexander Winsek said he was weighing whether to vote AfD for the first time. “I think the AfD has some very good ideas, like limiting the influx of migrants,” Winsek said. He added that he did not back every AfD position: “I’d like to stay in NATO, I’d like to keep the euro, and I’m not exactly pro-Russia.”

Winsek said Siegmund could swing his vote because the candidate stood out from other AfD figures whom he characterized as leaning on doom, gloom and threats. Siegmund, he said, is “can-do and refreshingly optimistic” and “the breath of fresh air democracy needs.”

At Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, political scientist Marcel Lewandowsky, author of the book “What Populists Want,” pushed back against the assumption that AfD voters favor autocracy. “We can see in the polls that the greatest share of AfD voters is pro-democracy,” Lewandowsky said, while noting the same share believes democracy is not functioning in Germany. The AfD, he added, promises voters “real” democracy — a pledge he said other parties struggle to match. “The more they want to defend democracy against the AfD, the more they seem like the establishment that doesn’t want to share their state, their government, their institutions with the silent majority which the AfD claims to represent.”

The anti-establishment appeal no longer stays in eastern Germany. At the federal level, the AfD is also polling first. A Saxony-Anhalt win would be a breakthrough for a party that has been classified as right-wing extremist by domestic intelligence authorities in several German states.

Sunday’s vote lands in the political context reported by MSI on September 2, when Germany’s chronic post-pandemic stagnation and competitive pressure from Chinese exports were framed as drivers of the AfD’s strength in Saxony-Anhalt and at the federal level.