Sachsen-Anhalt's Far-Right Crime Numbers Just Hit a Record — Weeks Before the AfD Could Take Power

Sachsen-Anhalt's interior ministry handed journalists a number this year that it clearly wished it didn't have to: 4,144 politically motivated crimes recorded in 2025, the highest ever counted in the state, with 3,007 of them — more than seventy percent — coming from the far right. Two years earlier that far-right count stood at 2,036. It is not a blip. It is not noise in one bad news cycle. It is a curve, and the curve points straight up, timed to land just weeks before a state election in which the AfD is polling as the strongest party and its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, is openly campaigning to govern alone.

The interior minister, Tamara Zieschang of the CDU, framed the numbers as evidence that political violence 'remains one of the central challenges to internal security' — the kind of sentence a state government reaches for when it wants to look concerned without naming who is doing the threatening. But the ministry's own officials were more specific: in Halle and Magdeburg, xenophobic and racist offenses dominate the caseload. This is not an abstract rise in 'extremism.' It is a rise in attacks on people the far right has decided don't belong here, concentrated in the state's two largest cities, rising fastest exactly as an openly revisionist party campaigns to run the police that are supposed to investigate it.

Independent monitoring backs the police numbers rather than undercutting them. The Mobile Opferberatung run by the association Miteinander counted 229 cases of racist, right-wing, queerphobic and antisemitic violence across the state last year, 129 of them in Halle and Magdeburg alone — and its project lead, Antje Arndt, described something the crime statistics can't capture: a 'strategy of taking space,' pressure and intimidation applied before violence ever gets counted, until people targeted by it simply leave or make themselves invisible. That is the part official tallies always miss. The number that matters isn't just how many attacks get reported to police — it's how many never get the chance to happen because someone already left town.

None of this is unique to one state. Nationally, the BKA logged 84,172 politically motivated crimes for 2024, a 40 percent jump and the steepest single-year rise since the reporting system began in 2001 — with far-right offenses making up roughly half. Germany's own domestic intelligence service now counts 58,700 people in its far-right threat pool, up from 50,250 the year before, 15,600 of them assessed as violence-prone. Every layer of the state's own accounting agrees: this is not a fringe problem being managed down. It is a mainstreaming problem being managed around, while a party whose platform treats organizations like Miteinander as an enemy campaigns to hold the ministries that fund them.

The lesson isn't complicated and it isn't new: the record always comes right before the next one. Waiting on the state to self-correct through an election that a far-right party is favored to win is not a plan, it's a bet against the numbers the state itself just published. Community-run counter-monitoring, mutual aid for people being pushed out of their neighborhoods, and organizing that doesn't depend on which party holds the interior ministry are what actually held the line in Halle and Magdeburg this year. That work doesn't pause for a vote count.

Sources

MDR: Rekordwert – nie gab es mehr politisch motivierte Straftaten in Sachsen-Anhalt

Ministerium für Inneres und Sport Sachsen-Anhalt: PMK-Präsentation 2024 (PDF)

Tagesschau: Verfassungsschutz – Zahl extremistischer Personen so hoch wie nie

Tagesschau: Politisch motivierte Kriminalität steigt laut Statistik um 40 Prozent