Politics · Openreadery Editorial · 1970-01-01
44 percent AfD, but not a majority: Halle responds with 2,300 anti-fascists on the streets
Deutsch (original) · Auto-translated to English
The numbers from Saxony-Anhalt are there, and they are as bad as feared, but not worse: 43.8 percent for the AfD, the strongest force in every single municipality in the country - and still not an absolute majority in the state parliament. The CDU fell to 17.2 percent. Ulrich Siegmund is now openly recruiting other members of parliament for cooperation. The BSW, which railed against the "firewall" with Wagenknecht, Wittig and Dahn just a few days ago at its own "Festival of Freedom of Expression" in Magdeburg, is reportedly already preparing a first joint application with the AfD in the new state parliament. Anyone who believed that the firewall debate was just rhetoric for talk shows will be shown parliamentary practice here.
That's the one half-truth of this weekend. The other is on the cathedral square in Magdeburg and on the street in Halle. Around 8,000 people at the democracy festival, a total of around 10,000 participants in rallies in the state capital alone, organized by an alliance of 264 civil society organizations. And on election evening itself: an Antifa demo in Halle under the motto "Stay Antifa!", registered for 500, and in the end with over 2,300 participants - with support from Leipzig, Dresden, Jena and Berlin. This is not a folkloric aside about the election. This is the answer to the fact that a quarter of the seats in the state parliament are now occupied by a party that is classified as right-wing extremist, as confirmed by security authorities.
Anyone looking for explanations as to why "the East" votes this way is missing the real message: It's not just the East. It is a nationwide normalization in which a supposedly left-wing carnival party offers itself as a stirrup holder as soon as the numbers show enough to replace coalition discipline with power calculation. The “firewall” was never a wall of principle, it was a wall of arithmetic. As soon as the arithmetic changes, it falls - with the CDU, first quietly at the district level, now apparently with the BSW in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt.
This is not a reason for resignation, but rather a very concrete task. The 2,300 in Halle, the 8,000 in Magdeburg - these are not homogeneous blocks, but the foundation on which local structure is created: Antifa groups, trade union youth, migrant self-organization, queer collectives. This structure survives election nights, parliamentary majorities come and go. The task after September 6th is not to wait for the next election date, but to transform the networks from this weekend into permanent anti-fascist infrastructure - legal assistance, research against Nazi structures, solidarity with those who will be the first to be attacked after such a result: migrantsinside, queers, people without papers, journalistinside who continue to report.
Saxony-Anhalt has shown how quickly parliamentary firewalls become dummies. It also showed that tens of thousands of people will take to the streets in a single weekend when it matters most. Thinking of both together is the only honest assessment of this election Sunday.