AfD stronghold in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania: German Hell Demmin

A soporific sadness emanates from the huge parking lot on the edge of the small town of Demmin in Western Pomerania on this September Monday. Tedi, Kik, Jysk, Aldi, the usual discounters. The rush is limited. At least there's something going on at Aldi all the time.

"You look exhausted. Have you been drinking for a long time?", a young man with a tattooed neck and a beer in his hand shouts across the parking lot to a woman who actually seems slightly deranged. Without stopping, she calls back: “Yes, but it’s also because of the pregnancy.” Not sure if this is supposed to be a joke. Both laugh. Then she disappears into Aldi.

The man, let's call him Ricky, is 24 and works as a fiberglass fitter. He relaxes and leans on the railing in front of the shopping cart and lights a cigarette while he talks to the taz. The reason for the good mood here is undoubtedly the AfD's results in the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the day before.

The party has become the strongest force nationwide with over 38 percent. In Demmin, which has been a right-wing extremist stronghold since the 2000s, she even got significantly more. 53.3 percent of voters here voted for the AfD.

Ricky fingers another Marlboro from the big pack and talks about how tolerant he is. He has friends who vote for the left, but also “real right-wing extremists”. What are they like? “If they hit on a stranger on the street again or do anything else with them, even I’ll be out,” he assures. To then add: “Because you don’t even know whether he was born here.”

The Anklamer native is a newcomer to Demmin himself. His new hometown is around 40 kilometers southwest of Greifswald and has 9,500 residents. On her website she advertises to “strangers” with the marketing slogan: “...has something!” What Demmin is supposed to have other than a Nazi problem isn't clear at first glance.

The town hall, which was rebuilt after the fall of communism, is quite nice. Otherwise, the center, which was largely destroyed in the Second World War, was filled with prefabricated buildings. The city is best known nationally for its neo-Nazi march on May 8th.

This has been organized by the NPD and its successor party, Die Heimat, since 2007. It commemorates the mass suicide of Germans before the approaching Red Army in 1945. A small local group of anti-fascists has also been mobilizing against this for years.

The only thing that Ricky thinks is “shit” is that people in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania no longer tick like him and that over half of the voters in Demmin and the AfD have missed out on an absolute majority.

“Germany must finally wake up,” says a 23-year-old student with her blonde hair strictly tied back. “So that everything can be like in the GDR again.” She looks like she was just waiting for the moment to say these sentences.

Of course she was also “with Ulrich”. “He’s super nice.” Shine in her eyes. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD election winner in Saxony-Anhalt, toured Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania a week ago to support the election campaign. The right-wing extremist poster boy promised: “The sun rises in the east, but it will shine over all of Germany.”

The 20 or so AfD supporters that taz speaks to here repeatedly give the same reasons for their voting decision. Most of them say, sometimes after a short hesitation and at first quietly, but without any doubt, shame or fear in their voice: “Well, about the foreigners, so that they can be sent where they belong.” This is how a tenth grader puts it.

Unlike Ricky, she also knows the name of the man to whom she gave her first vote: Demmin native Enrico Schult, who is state chairman of the AfD together with Bundestag member Leif-Erik Holm and has also been parliamentary group leader in the Schwerin state parliament since the summer.

With first place on the state list, Schult was the actual “top candidate” of the extreme right, while the pale Holm was allowed to do the Greetings August for the cameras. The AfD grandly described Holm as a “prime minister candidate”, but otherwise he was only a direct candidate in Schwerin. Since neither of those things worked out, he's now just staying in Berlin.

The 47-year-old surveyor Schult was more successful. In the constituency to which Demmin belongs, he got the second-best first vote result in the country with over 54 percent after Manuela Schwesig, the SPD Prime Minister and Holm's direct competitor in Schwerin.

With a view to the SPD, the Left and the Greens in the state parliament, the foreseeable future coalition partners in Schwerin, Schult called out to his supporters on election evening: "If we march in here with our troops. They will tremble before us. And they are right to tremble." You can believe him: “We will win the next election and then we will no longer need a coalition partner.”

The next day he tried to appear “moderate” in front of journalists at Schwerin Castle. He complains a bit because the way his party was treated during the election campaign “wasn’t always fair in terms of content.” And otherwise claims that after the CDU's failure at the five percent hurdle, the AfD is "the only party" that "can bring bourgeois-conservative positions into the state parliament." Finally: “The AfD is a blessing for democracy.”

When taz asked how this would work together with extremists like the future state parliament member Tommy Thormann, who won a direct mandate on Rügen and wanted to “ban political opponents to the ground”, Schult played it down. This was all “taken out of context”. He sees Thormann's direct mandate as a “sign that he enjoys the trust of the people on Rügen”. The AfD is a “blessing” because of the increased voter turnout.

However, a large number of his own people find Schult's habitus and his emphasis on supposedly bourgeois-conservative positions - similar to Holm - visibly too lax and not radically right-wing enough. When re-elected as parliamentary group leader on Tuesday, more than a third of the 32 AfD MPs voted against Schult.

In the Aldi parking lot in Demmin you meet just as many passers-by who not only don't believe Schult's assurances - but who have been downright afraid since Sunday. This also applies to the three senior women who have just come from eating cake.

One of them, an 81-year-old former nurse, says: “I fear that there will be another war with the AfD.” She lives on a pension of 1,000 euros a month. “We didn’t have a collective agreement in the doctor’s office.” She too is bothered by a lot of things about the current situation. Nevertheless, she voted for the SPD with both votes.