That doesn’t bode well…
Nope. And there’s no major anti-Nazi military power left in the world to put us back on track this time :( vomits
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*Pulls up soapbox* A little bit of background might be in order:
- AfD is the strongest party in all of the former GDR states, including SA where yesterdays’ elections were held. They stand for unbridled, neoliberal capitalism, garnished with lots of anti-immigration rhetoric. Their boss worked for Goldman-Sachs and that’s saying it all, really.
- SA - one state out of 16 - has 2.1 million inhabitants, out of Germany’s 83.5 million. They do have an outsized influence on the 2nd chamber of parliament, though. As of now, it looks like they will form a coalition government and rule SA.
- In the whole of Germany, AfD currently polls at 27-28%; runner-up is the conservative CDU which is currently leading the federal government, at 20-21%. AfD polls especially high in places where the previous, notorious right-wing party, NPD, did; and before them, the NSDAP. They poll especially high among blue-collar workers, first-time (young) voters and previous non-voters.
- In the EU parliament, AfD has 15 of ESN’s 27 seats. Judging from the seating in the parliament, and from who wants to form a coalition with the AfD, it becomes clear that they are significantly farther right-wing than the likes of Orbán, Le Pen, Fico, Meloni, Salvini or any of the EU-wide known names, really.
- I recommend this free 2024 study to assess the immense danger democracy in Germany is facing. Trans people, women, feminists, Jews, immigrants, social Darwinism - far-right wing voters poll approximately 1.5-3x as high in “hate” values than right-wing voters.
- The long and short is: Don’t come to Germany, especially not Eastern Germany, and especially not if you don’t have lily-white skin. This is my honest, sober advice for you.
former GDR states
Who could’ve predicted that people who spent half a century under radical socialism, will be right wing and pro capitalism
They didn’t live under “radical socialism”
I swear to God you people are so fucking stupid. Lookup what words mean. You are destroying EVERYTHING WITH YOUR STUPIDITY
WE HAVE TOLERATED THE STUPID TOO MUCH. STUPID PEOPLE NEED TO BE SHOUTED DOWN AND TREATED APPROPRIATELY.
NAZIS NEED TO NOT EXIST. WE LET THEM GO BEFORE AND LOOK WHAT THEY DID.
PEDOPHILIC, AUTHORITARIAN FACSISTS ARE INFECTING EVERYWHERE AND WE ALL KNOWTHE FEW BEHIND IT. WE ALL KNOW WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO THEM. WE ALL KNOW WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN TO PEDOPHILIC TRAITORS.
They didn’t live under “radical socialism”
Ah right. Trump had a “Radical” idea to build a wall to keep people out. GDR built a wall to KEEP PEOPLE IN, so they can’t escape. Totally not radical idea. Of corse it was in the name of “enlightened” socialism.
You’re full of shit
SA
Misread it initially as Sturmabteilung, not Saxony-Anhalt. In any case, it’s now a hostile state.
The correct abbreviation would be ST, not SA, but considering the AfD is now close to an absolute majority the latter fits better.
It’s like Germans have acquired collective amnesia with regards to what happened during 1939.
A life and a half, or a few generations, is all you need for people to start questioning “was it really that bad???”, and then there’ll be snake oil salesman selling snake oil to those who don’t listen to history. And let’s not pretend most of these right-wingers are actually idealistic, they’re all greed pigs after money and power.
Isn’t it crazy that people know what the word “scapegoat” means but are unable to see it?
Like. How can so many people be so incapable of following basic logic to see that immigrants are not what’s caused their quality of life to decline.
East Germany is a complex subject. A lot of money has gone into projects to help it catch up after the reunification since Russia completely gutted it, but not much of that money made it anywhere. The population feels left behind and unheard. They’re being treated as lesser through little fault of their own. Pretty easy breeding ground for scape goating.
Plus it’s the exact same playbook as the US when it comes to “iMmIgRaNtS!!!”. Logic and reason has long left and there’s really no way to reel in conspiracy nuts once they’ve gone off the rails. Germany is only a few years behind the US.
How would you even prevent this? The ideas spread by messenger and social media and infect people without critical thinking skills - which is most. Chat control is obviously the wrong approach, but what is the right one? How do you convince clanma who doesn’t trust anything anymore that the WhatsApp stats are made up and government statistics are actually trustworthy and backed by data?
What’s the media landscape like in Germany?
You have state media which is mostly balanced, possibly a little left, and then private conglomerates that love discord, so mostly right leaning and inflammatory. Anything Springer Verlag is garbage, for example. Not as bad as the US with Fox.
People want to have a good life, no matter their critical thinking levels. If your government tries to fuck you and practically only works for lobbyists they will happily jump on any bandwagon praising to be the holy god.
Please, stop protecting them and repeating this nonsense. The West German mark and the East German mark were converted at a 1:1 rate right after the Wende. People in the GDR were not all living in Plattenbauten. Many had their own houses, and many others left for southern Germany and Switzerland instead of staying and helping to rebuild the country.
Since then, billions of euros have been transferred from West Germany to East Germany. I remember very well people in the East having two cars and renovating their houses. I had far relatives there, so I saw it myself. Meanwhile, parts of the West, especially the Ruhr area, were struggling heavily, with municipalities accumulating huge debts that they are still dealing with today.
And now they want to tell the West, which has spent decades financing and rebuilding this part of the country, what it should do?
You know what? It might have been better for West Germany if reunification had never happened and East Germany had simply been sold to Russia - at least it seems that’s also their wish.
That’s the exact mindset that got us here. Dismissing and invalidating their feelings. The West struggling doesn’t invalidate their struggle. Russia completely gutted anything industrial, literally taking apart all machinery and moving it to Russia. There was nothing to build on and companies didn’t move there, either. So despite the common struggle, the East wasn’t really able to build any lasting base industry-wise.
disagree with you. I’ve seen and met enough East Germans to have a very different perspective. From my experience, there is often very little empathy - especially towards people of different skin colours or sexual orientations. There is a reason why parts of eastern Germany are sometimes referred to as Dunkeldeutschland.
Did they ever thank West Germans for the help? NEVER. If anything, it’s been the opposite: demanding more and more. And again, telling West Germans what they have to do. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you, something many East Germans seem not to understand.
If you feel so strongly about it, I suggest you pay back the Solidaritätsbeitrag, which has amounted to billions over the years.
Ah yes the helping hand from the west. Buying company inventories and closing them afterwards. Mass unemployment. Integration without the ability to influence the legal foundations of their new state. Those ungrateful east germans who could not build their own industry! And all that comes from the ones that build generational wealth from billions of nazi money. Adidas, VW, Bayer, Allianz, Krupp.
Me, too, most recently a coworker from Gera.
I believe the money is part of the issue, and you expecting thanks is telling. Also, “the hand that feeds you” is the exact “lesser human” rhetoric I meant.
If the populace never felt the effect of the money, it might as well never have existed. The West is angry for sending it and the East is angry for not receiving it. Whoever pockets it gladly stands by and watches the East and West fight each other.
I don’t think the Soli is the right tool for the job. The money is just part of the regular budget and not bound to East Germany. Build universities or invest in faculties, infrastructure, etc. and make the region worth investing in from an economic standpoint and the rest will follow, none of which we’re doing.
The only place to fight it is off the internet.
But it is much harder. You have to go out and socialize, in person.
Plus most people don’t want to talk politics. At least in the U.S, it is considered a somewhat rude or inappropriate conversation topic in casual conversations.
Like religion.
Some people still do it and sometimes it just comes up. But generally it’s seen as pushy. Or trying to start an argument.
But talking politics to friends and family is usually considered fine. Depends on the family members. So I do keep up these conversations with friends and some family members, when I can. Remind them that you can only trust what you hear from real people.
The internet would have you believe the majority of Americans are maga. When it’s actually only 30%.
Plus most people don’t want to talk politics. At least in the U.S, it is considered a somewhat rude or inappropriate conversation topic in casual conversations.
Germans are thankfully more open about discussing politics in my experience. But it’s difficult because people get tiktok brain worms and their logical side goes out the window. Back in the US, we still haven’t figured out the solution to this.
The internet would have you believe the majority of Americans are maga. When it’s actually only 30%.
Depends where you live tbh.
Sucks. I did my study abroad mostly in Saxon-Anhalt. Beautiful place. But I’m also not entirely surprised by this embrace of AfD there. Even though it was a little over 10 years ago that I was there, I certainly saw a lot more alt right influence compared to other parts of Germany.
So the Nazis will return to Germany?
They never left (West) Germany.
AfD is bigger in east Germany.
West German Nazis are mostly closeted in CDU and FDP, cosplaying democrats.
And not just a little, like more than double.
it’s almost like regions that experienced decades of decline, malnourishment, and poor education are prime breeding grounds for nationalism.
Yep, with the dissolution of the GDR came a thorough eradication of all organized socialists in the East, who were purged and punished by the western half. This created a vacuum easily filled by the far-right.
Ah… I see you are from .ml…
First, currently whole Europe is shifting right, so its not only the dissolution of the GDR at play here. However, that the former GDR is a bit farther along can be explained partly by the older generation in the GDR having been socialized in an authoritarian regime, a neo-liberal shift in the last decade(s) afterwards and missing strong civil society, where they felt left behind which affected the youth. And the right was there to gain traction over all these years.
I don’t agree to your framing as ‘all organized socialists’ getting ‘purged and punished’, because many individuals are still alive and well today. The PDS, now ‘Die Linke’ had or has a couple of them in their ranks. Many mistakes where done in the dissolution, but it has been a generally positive change for the people in east Germany.
BSW, the ‘other left’, and Putin sympathizer party, founded by an ex-SED politician, is actually closer to the far-right AfD in term of foreign policy, immigration and other topics, then other parties, supporting my point that the common thread is actually authoritarianism then actual social values.
I see that you are from lemmy.world, and I see that we are both using Lemmy. I don’t really see what that has to do with anything.
As for the whole of Europe surging to the right, I am well aware. The global south is managing to develop through increased south-south trade, which is weakening European abilities to benefit from unequal exchange and imperialism. There’s a ton of intricacies I just glossed over, but what we are seeing isn’t anything new: when capitalist economies suffer crisises in profitability, they surge to the right as smaller capitalists feel squeezed out and larger capitalists take advantage of this.
My point on the former GDR regions being especially vulnerable to this rightward shift is just that, the trend is broad but is especially pronounced in the GDR due to the crushing of the socialists during the reintegration of eastern Germany into the west.
One thing I strongly disagree with is your analysis of what authority actually is. By all means, Germany today is an “authoritarian regime.” States exist to uphold the ruling class of society and to prevent other classes from gaining political power. The extent to which authority is applied depends on the conditions a society is in. Modern Germany is a dictatorship of capital, and is an imperialist state. The former GDR was a socialist state, where the working classes ran society. Both are “authoritarian,” in that both exerted controls on those who undermined the state, but both serve enormously different groups of people.
As far as modern socialist parties in Germany are concerned, the KPD and DKP seem to be more representative of socialist views.
Fuck, people are dumb all over the globe.
Xenophobia is at an all-time high.
And that’s one of the greatest proofs that people across different cultures are more alike than different.
I’ve met lots of people from different countries and the story is always the same. Low wages, jobs hard to find, housing inaccessible, politicians corrupt. Then the response is always to find a scapegoat. That’s the root of fascism, authoritarianism, whatever you want to call it.
That’s kinda sweet in a disappointing way.
They’re also manipulated on a global scale.
You can thank social media networks and private for profit media conglomerates for this.
Always have been and always will be. Humans are not as smart as people like to think they are. Humans have a shitton of PR teams to sell you that people are smarter than they actually are.
… the AfD, whose Saxony-Anhalt branch is categorised as “right-wing extremist” by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
More useless labels I see. Doesn’t seem to mean anything if they are still allowed to be a legit political party who can take power.
It actually allows intelligence agencies more capabilities for investigations. This is Germany, remember. Paperwork…
I’ve come to realize most of our justice system is toothless. ICJ? Useless. EU? Lol. Verfassungsschutz? Nope. The police will enforce copyright law for movies because of corporate interests, but anything larger than isolated cases is too big to address. Law and order are mass hallucinations in the western world, easily exploited by anyone ruthless enough to try. And it feels like we’ve reached a point of saturation where the ruthless are no longer satisfied with what they were previously able to achieve within the confines of this hallucination, so they’re just tearing it down.
What can we do about it? The overlap with anarchism is large: use cash, don’t buy from Amazon (or similar), use Linux, don’t pay for subscriptions. Don’t use AI. They want your money; don’t give it to them. Sadly, 90% of the population have no impulse control, or I’m asking them to abstain from the only pleasure they have left in their lives - everything else has already been torn down.
I’m gonna go be depressed by myself for a while.
Fun fact: this useless label is there so the afd can be forbidden, since “right-wing extremist” also means anti-constitution, but our goverment is too busy filling the pockets of their lobby friends.
It’s almost like capitalism is incompatible with democracy.
Incompatible if unchecked and it definitely shouldn’t be running it, it shouldn’t be the singular pillar, it shouldn’t be a way to gauge who is more free than others. It should be a part of an economic system if anything, not the entire point of one. Unfortunately we have a bunch of mentally ill members of our species who hold it up as some magical end all be all, even despite warnings from various ancient cultures about how bad that turns out when you do that.
Exactly, it’s supposed to mean something… In theory…
Germany: Hey America, hold my beer.
Seriously UK and Germany, you guys trying to upstage us or something?
Israel is working overtime to keep all 3 allies supporting Israel, even if it means destroying those same allies.
It this a case where the economically repressed are being used to breed an ugly us vs them situation, to pit them against immigrants using their own national xenophobia, tribalism and false nostalgia? The way to fight this is to feed the wealth back to the people. Tax (or eat) the rich, and education. Also listen to their valid concerns. Just making their ‘right wing’ group illegal will only further resentment. I doubt the people are really right wing in the economic sense at all. The bigotry can be much more easily addressed one people feel safe and secure.
The solution you bring up are impossible to achieve as long as the same oligachrs that breed the right wing are allowed to control the narrative via social media. Education, healthcare, civil rights? Communist! The US is the leading example that people are ready to actively fighting the solutions knstead of the problems, as long as unhinged propaganda is deemed as valid opinion.
So eat the rich it is!
The German state apparatus was too busy harassing legitimate pro-palestian protest to do anything about the actual threat to its constitutional order.
Oh, good burn.
Damn, I forgot all my German, is English okay or I have to take lessons before the invasion?
Its the AfD so you’re prolly better off picking up Russian.
Jesus christ it’s Jason burn
Polling stations open in Saxony-Anhalt with anti-immigration party AfD predicted to gain 41% vote share
Kate Connolly in Berlin
Sun 6 Sep 2026 06.50 EDT
Polls have opened in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the populist, far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is predicted to emerge on top in an election that could have a groundbreaking effect on Germany’s political landscape.
About 1.7 million people are eligible to vote. Polling booths opened at 8am local time and will close at 6pm, when exit polls are expected to deliver an initial indication of whether the AfD has secured enough votes for an absolute majority, enabling it to govern the state.
That would mark the first time the party had won a state government, and the first time since the second world war that a rightwing extremist party had gained power at regional state or parliament level in Germany.
Final polls before the vote showed the AfD to have about 40-41% of support. The number of undecided voters in advance of the vote was much lower than at previous elections, polling showed.
Currently, the small state is governed by the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, together with two smaller parties. The CDU, on about 23%, under its state prime minister, Sven Schulze, hopes to be able to construct a multiparty coalition to be able to retain power.
The CDU and all other mainstream parties have refused to be in coalition with the AfD in a government, in what is referred to as a Brandmauer or firewall. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt has been classed as “rightwing extremist” by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.
The AfD’s lead candidate is Ulrich Siegmund, 35, a former fragrance salesman with a large following on TikTok who has been celebrated like a pop star. He has insisted he will take power only if the party receives an absolute majority, and would not tolerate a coalition with another party.
The Saxony-Anhalt election is the biggest test yet for Merz, who is unpopular, along with his government, after having failed in his promises to reset Germany’s struggling economy and reduce the support for the AfD. Irregular immigration has reduced since he has been in office, but not to the extent that it has appeased the average voter.
If the AfD won convincingly, it would put huge pressure on Merz. In national polls, the CDU has also been overtaken by the AfD, which has its eyes on victory at the next federal election in 2029.
If the AfD is elected in Saxony-Anhalt, Siegmund has promised to start a remigration and deportation offensive, ban rainbow flags in schools and halt the building of new wind farms.
He wants to change the slogan of the state from “Think modern” to “Think German” and to reintroduce the singing of the national anthem in schools.
Siegmund has sought to capitalise on a mood of ostalgie – nostalgia for communist East Germany – and to tap into discontent amongst east Germans who view themselves as second-class citizens to people from the west.
He turned up to vote on Sunday morning with his wife, riding an East German-era moped in the party colours, which was also a prominent prop during the election campaign in rallies across the state. In a statement in front of the polling station, he voiced his optimism that the party would achieve “45%, and some”.
All eyes on Saxony-Anhalt – what will AfD do if it wins German state poll?
Thousands of opponents of the AfD gathered in the state capital, Magdeburg, on Saturday for a “festival of democracy”.
On Saturday evening, a message beamed onto the facade of Magdeburg Cathedral read: “We do not abandon what we love. True love of the homeland is not the AfD.”
The bishop of Magdeburg, Gerhard Feige, in an address to a gathering of churchgoers, warned against forces “that want to sow discord, stoke mistrust and fear”. He drew parallels to historical developments, warning that a democracy has the potential to abolish itself. “Not everyone who votes or is elected democratically is a democrat,” he said.
The German Economic Institute has warned of the far-reaching consequences for the German economy, in Saxony-Anhalt and beyond, specifically over its immigration policy, which it said would be “calamitous” for the state, which has an ageing, dwindling population and is heavily dependent on foreign workers.
Critics have also warned, due to the Kremlin-friendly stance of the party, that an AfD-run state could leak sensitive information to Russia. The AfD has dismissed such claims. It has said it would seek to reform the domestic intelligence service, calling it biased.
The latest poll by the public broadcaster ZDF on Thursday put the AfD on a decisive lead of 41%, with the CDU trailing on 23%, the far-left Die Linke on 11.5%, the Social Democrats on 8.5% and the Greens on 6%. Two smaller parties failed to reach the 5% hurdle needed to re-enter parliament.
Independent election observers are active at polling booths amid speculation from the AfD that voter fraud has taken place, in particular in postal voting, with specific focus on a retirement home. State authorities have denied the claims.
In my opinion they’ll gain until they are no longer in the opposition. Only then Germans will realize once more that fascism isn’t great for anyone but a few at the top. I’m not an accelerationist myself, but we’re seeing the same happening in the US.
They will spin the narratives to blame anyone else. Watch Trump, it works!
Trump has record low popularity. That’s exactly my point.
But about 30 % still think he’s a good leader… after all he did that number would be close to 0 if people weren’t distracted by fingerpointing.
they already had some chances to show what they can do. and failed expectedly
all that happens is, that they blame other parties anyway, and still gain popularity
