© REUTERS/Matthias Rietschel

Michael Kretschmer is the day’s hero. Deeply exhausted, Saxony’s state premier blinks under the harsh light of the television cameras. “The most important message of this day is: friendly Saxony has won,” he says among huge applause from his fellow Christian Democrats.

The first exit polls of Saxony’s state elections on September 1 had just been published. And while the xenophobic, revisionist, and populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was able to nearly triple its results to 27.5 percent (from 9.7 percent in 2014), it didn’t come in first.

Kretschmer’s CDU won 32.1 percent, by far the worst result in 30 years of governing Saxony. Even so, Angela Merkel’s party continues to be the strongest party, and Kretschmer will continue as state premier if he can put together a workable coalition with the Greens. This time at least, the AfD will not make it into power.

A Personal Victory

This is Kretschmer’s personal victory. Nobody here has ever campaigned as hard as this 44-year-old engineer from the Eastern city of Görlitz, who spent the last two months crisscrossing his state, shaking hands, grilling sausages, and talking to absolutely everybody. Not for the last 20 years, a pollster said on Sunday night, did any of the Saxony premiers achieve as high a personal recognition score as Kretschmer.

In neighboring Brandenburg, which also held state elections on September 1, the picture is similar. Here, the race was even tighter, but in the end, the incumbent prime minister Dietmar Woidke managed to squeeze into first—26.2 percent for his Social Democrats versus 23.5 percent for the AfD. Coalition talks will likely be even more difficult than in Saxony, but the AfD was kept at bay.

Three conclusions stand out from these crucial state elections:

The first one is paradoxical: Kretschmer’s and Woidke’s narrow victories will strengthen their respective parties in Berlin and help to stabilize Merkel’s coalition government. At the federal level, both Christian and Social Democrats are profoundly relieved; they have gained a bit of time to turn things around in Berlin. Yet neither of them did much to help Kretschmer or Woidke win their elections.

On the contrary: Chancellor Angela Merkel is so intensely disliked by many voters in the East for her refugee policy in 2015 that local Christian Democrats didn’t even want her to show up for the election campaign. Merkel’s successor at the helm of the CDU, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, is struggling with her leadership role. And the SPD, which has been hit by ever more catastrophic election results, currently doesn’t even have a leader.

The second lesson is a pessimistic one: thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the AfD is deepening the split between East and West. The pollsters infratest dimap found that in Saxony, 66 percent believe that East Germans are being treated as second-class citizens. Among AfD voters, that share goes up to 78 percent.

During the election campaign, the AfD not only played on the resentment in the former East Germany, they stirred and stoked it. Its message has played particularly well in regions which have seen a massive exodus of higher-skilled people toward the West. The result is a deep mistrust of the country’s mostly West German elites and democratic institutions which will poison German society for a long time to come.

Yet the AfD’s success as the Easterners’ party—and this is the third conclusion—could prove a mixed blessing for the party. In Saxony and in Brandenburg, the party’s leading candidates belong to the far-right wing of the party, which is radically anti-foreigner and anti-establishment and unafraid of links with neo-Nazi groups.

Their strong showing in Sunday’s elections will give them sway over the party’s future direction. But what worked well in Saxony and Brandenburg may turn out to be a liability for elections in western Germany, where the party’s base is ultra-conservative rather than far-right. Also, most West Germans find the anti-Western sentiment that the AfD fueled in the East hard to stomach.

Shooting Itself in the Foot

Keep in mind, finally, that the numbers are firmly on western Germany’s side—North Rhine-Westphalia alone has far more inhabitants than all the East German Länder together—and it becomes clear that with its turn toward the east, the AfD may be shooting itself in the foot.

Autumn has only just started, and Germany still has one more regional election scheduled in the east. Thuringia will go to the polls on October 27. But it’s a slightly smaller state and, according to the latest polls, unlikely to give the AfD the big victory it was hoping for.

So what Germany has now, is a reprieve: for Merkel’s government in Berlin, for the political mainstream, and for the business community which feared that investors would pull out after an AfD victory. Right-wing populism is dangerously high and still rising—but time is not necessarily on its side. “We now have five years,” Kretschmer said—the next state elections are scheduled for 2024. “Time to also speak to those whom we have not yet been able to reach.”

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© REUTERS/Matthias Rietschel

Back in 2000, Kurt Biedenkopf, then prime minister of the federal state of Saxony, made a peculiar statement. Saxonians, said this experienced West German politician who had moved east after the fall of the Berlin wall, had “shown themselves to be completely immune against extreme rightist temptations.” Biedenkopf was wrong. And by banking on denial, he contributed to making things worse.

This week’s right-wing riots that shook Chemnitz, Saxony’s third largest city, have roots reaching well back into the 1990s. That period was one of huge disruption for East Germans, calling into doubt much of what they had lived and worked for. It was also the time when neo-Nazi and right-wing extremists started to spread out their networks and make inroads into mainstream society.

So, what happened in Chemnitz? On August 26, a 35-year old German was knifed to death in this city of 240,000, a bleak place dominated by socialist-era high-rises and a gigantic statue of the head of Karl Marx. Police quickly arrested two refugees, a 22-year old Iraqi and a 23-year old Syrian, as the main suspects. That same evening, neo-Nazi groups took to the streets, hunting and attacking any foreigners they could find. Undermanned and under-equipped, the police mostly looked on.

Worse, the police were still badly understaffed the next day when right-wing extremists organized another march through Chemnitz. 6000 people joined in, some of them hard-core Nazis who were emboldened enough to give the Hitler salute (a crime in Germany) in front of cameras and police units. 20 people were injured in clashes between neo-Nazis and left-wing counter-demonstrators.

A Bungled Operation

Clearly, the police operation was bungled; just as clearly, Saxony has a growing problem with right-wing sympathizers within the police and justice system. Shockingly, a justice official in the state capital Dresden took a picture of the arrest warrant for the two men from Iraq and Syria, listing their full names, the names of witnesses and the judges involved. The document was then illegally spread through right-wing social networks. The official was later suspended from his duties.

In a more harmless, yet equally revealing incident in mid-August in Dresden, policemen had detained a television crew for 45 minutes during a rally of the anti-foreigner movement Pegida after one of the demonstrators had protested against being filmed. The demonstrator later turned out to be an employee of the state office of criminal investigation–he has since been suspended, too. Yet it took the Dresden police several days to officially apologized to the TV crew.

For years, Saxony has led the statistics in Germany for hate crimes against foreigners. It was also home to the NSU, a right-wing terrorist group that between 2000 and 2007 murdered nine immigrants and one policewoman. In Saxony, neo-Nazis have established powerful informal networks. Soccer fan clubs play a particular role, as do right-wing rock bands.

Successful in Saxony

There are social, economic, and psychological reasons why the German far-right is so spectacularly successful in Saxony. This once heavily industrialized region was hit particularly hard by the economic disruption which accompanied reunification. High unemployment and low wages have contributed to a widespread feeling among Saxonians of being second-class citizens in the new Germany. And when Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed nearly a million refugees to Germany in 2015, many East Germans felt even more abandoned, believing that the benefits they should have received were now being given to refugees.

Such resentment is not limited to Saxony or to eastern Germany. In many of West German cities, competition between low-income indigenous groups and refugees for apartments or childcare is much more acute. But Saxony has a long political tradition of underplaying right-wing tendencies. “Saxony does not have a significant problem with right-wing radicalism,” said then Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich as late as 2011, echoing Biedenkopf. As a consequence, the police and justice system failed to combat neo-Nazism effectively.

Saxony’s current Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer, a member of Merkel’s CDU, follows the line of his predecessors: naturally, he does not encourage xenophobia or neo-Nazism, but neither does he clearly point out what is right and wrong. And after the riots in Chemnitz, Kretschmer said that the police had done “a super job.”

Spreading into Politics

From fringe groups, right-wing ideology has spread not only into state institutions like the police, but also into politics. It was in Saxony that the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) used to register its best results; it’s here that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) now scores highest. At the federal elections in 2017, the AfD received 27 percent of votes and emerged (by a tiny margin) as the strongest party in Saxony. Also, the AfD members of the Bundestag elected in Saxony are among the most radical in the party. The most prominent of them is Jens Maier, a judge (!) from the Dresden district court.

The enormous success of the party in eastern Germany has also accelerated the radicalization of the party as a whole. Today’s xenophobic and revisionist AfD has little in common with the conservative, anti-Euro party founded in 2013 by West German conservative economists. And as the party has become more extremist, many of its members throughout Germany have become more radical as well.

As a consequence, Germany now has a sizeable far-right party that in spite of its leadership squabbles is stable and well established. With 15 to 17 percent in the polls, it appears that the AfD is here to stay. In a European context, that would not be unusual. But for Germany with its Nazi past and the Holocaust, it’s a disturbing first.

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