Asking residents in a city where a seismic political event has just taken place ‘How do you feel?’ demands chutzpah – this struck me as I walked around Magdeburg, Germany on Monday. The night before, the far-right populist, anti-immigrant, pro-Kremlin party Alternative für Deustchland (AfD) had landslide 44% win in Saxony-Anhalt’s state elections, sending shock waves to Berlin, across Germany and way beyond. Regardless of how people in the capital voted, it felt like a bit of an affront to probe.
Given the radical plans of the victors, a party classified by domestic intelligence as “rightwing extremist”, that is what I wanted to know. But from the 21-year-old Guinean-German paramedic I met at the central bus station, collecting donations for a local hospice, to the elderly couple returning to their apartment after a stroll down the Elbe river, almost everyone I met opened up to me warmly. Judith, 88, was initially reluctant to talk, but shared some of her life story.
Her experience as an eight-year-old refugee, forced to leave Poland in 1946 and eventually ending up move with her family in Magdeburg, had shaped her outlook on life, her successful career as a project engineer – as well as her politics. The news that AfD had not only won the election, but by such a wide margin, was “heartbreaking”, she said. Huy, from Vietnam, who runs a newsagents in the city centre, was also reticent, but laughed and rolled his eyes as he sold the last copy of that day’s local paper, Die Volksstimme, and pointed to the headline that read: “Landslide in Saxony-Anhalt”.
Shaking his head, he said: “44%!” “I don’t want to think what it might mean … but maybe it will all be OK?” His question hung in the air. A glance at the AfD’s manifesto, in particular its pledge for the first 100 days, focuses the mind. Top of the list: challenging Germany’s post-war memory culture (which it says stands in the way of national pride) – so, “more Bismarck, less Hitler”, as they put it.
I met Franz-Josef, a 71-year-old retired mechanic and Green voter, on holiday from a small west German town. He called the election a “catastrophe”, particularly in the light of the country’s Nazi past. Luisa, a 34-year-old bank teller told me she hopes “those who voted for the AfD thought about what they were doing”.
It was one thing, she said, to “deliver a kick in the shins” to Berlin, over its failure to pull the German economy out of the doldrums. And maybe the AfD would fail to push through its promises in government. He lacks an absolute majority by a whisker.
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