After the Saxony-Anhalt election: The alternatives to the alternative

Since the election in Saxony-Anhalt, I think back every day to a conversation with the author Mely Kiyak. At the beginning of 2024, millions of people in Germany took to the streets against the AfD. “We are the firewall!” they shouted. Many people gained hope. For a moment, the AfD's poll numbers even fell.

But Mely Kiyak said: "Politically, what is currently happening is irreversible. We are experiencing a society that has lost its solidarity and treats one another with deep vileness. If a country does not start early enough to contain destructive forces, it will be a hard country with a hard life. After the tipping points, you can protest and scandalize for a while, then those who will also make this possibility taboo will come to power."

If the AfD is in power, she wants to see who else will sign open letters and continue to get involved. In fact, there are street protests again, but nowhere near as many as a year and a half ago - although the AfD is closer to power in Saxony-Anhalt than ever. So have the tipping points already been reached?

43.8 percent of voters in Saxony-Anhalt voted for a right-wing extremist party, wanting to feel particularly great at the price of humiliating others. That is significantly more than the 20 percent “brown sediment” that the Thuringian constitutional chief once spoke of. The AfD's contempt for humanity can be found in more and more milieus and is spreading from east to west.

The de-solidarized society that Mely Kiyak described is thriving. Civil society and party political actors who are opposing this are now reporting that they have long since exceeded their limits. You now need to be financially secure first and foremost. This is what the new Fund for Democracy is promoting.

One of the founders of the fund is Marco Wanderwitz, CDU politician and former Federal Government Commissioner for the East. He warned as early as 2021 that part of East Germans were lost to democracy. In order not to lose more of them and to protect marginalized groups, democratic safe spaces are needed. For debate, debate and alternative culture. We have to quickly adjust to what Mely Kiyak calls a “hard life”.

Dissenters, queers, people with a migration background, people with disabilities – they have been afraid since election Sunday. Meanwhile, the supposedly charming Ulrich Siegmund is now uncharmingly insulting the capital's press instead of just the local press. But the success of the AfD is not due to the smile of its Saxony-Anhalt top candidate. A survey from Thuringia suggests that even the rude Björn Höcke continues to gain approval there. The AfD is on the rise, no matter who is under the chancellor.

In Saxony-Anhalt, the party was able to win over people in all voter groups for its racist program, especially workers and people with a low level of education. There are many of both in Saxony-Anhalt. One in five people here is considered to be at risk of poverty, economic growth is lower than in any other federal state, very few people in Germany have a high school diploma and most often leave school without a qualification. The well-educated usually move away. What remains is a fragmented infrastructure and the absence of a future in an area that is 97 percent rural.

The AfD is targeting precisely this rural area, and not just in Saxony-Anhalt. This has been known at least since their strategy paper on “rural space acquisition”. In order to take action against this, civil society actors played the hinterland more than ever before and organized large festivals in the run-up to the election.

This is also the case in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – in some cases for a very long time. Jan Gorkow, known as Monchi from Feine Sahne Fischfilet, has been organizing the Wasted in Jarmen festival in his home village for ten years. In his current book “Behind the Firewall” he describes how he openly involves as many local people as possible in the preparation. He stays in the conversation and conducts exactly the kind of political discourse in his village that others from afar consider to be important.

Gorkow is also committed to his village beyond the festival and set up a skate park together with the non-party mayor. But despite everything, he woke up after the 2025 federal election and saw that the AfD had received 54 percent of the vote in Jarmen. What else helps now?

That is exactly the gap: in order to save parliamentary democracy, civil society celebrations of any kind do not seem to influence voting behavior. At least not to the extent necessary. However, the offer is also poor. The CDU finds it difficult to justify why you should vote for it instead of the right-wing original. The SPD has no answer as to why this society is becoming more and more anti-social, despite being in power for many years. A credible address from the center to the left would be urgently needed.

Many AfD voters are driven by enormous social anger, which the AfD serves and at the same time reinforces with its racist program and simplistic enemy images. Perhaps this social anger could also be channeled along another, yet to be defined, conflict. Since the AfD is particularly strong in rural areas, it will certainly not be the rent fight. And since AfD voters tend to be critical of state redistribution, it is not expropriation either.

In addition to convincing content, the democratic parties, at least in East Germany, also obviously lack the trust of voters. Trust comes from closeness – but where was the CDU in this election campaign? In Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD dominated the squares and streets. The bouncy castle at the so-called family festivals is an example of the many meeting places that had become so rare - and that the AfD has created again.

Loneliness is becoming increasingly important in election analysis. At a taz panel in Rostock, Christian Arnold Krüger, founder of the Queer-Strelitz association, described this very precisely: Many people in rural areas get up in the morning, have breakfast, get in their car, drive to work, drive back, eat dinner, maybe talk to their partner, and that's it. No contact. Then the AfD comes along and makes an offer that asks for nothing. No commitment to democracy, no understanding of the complex world situation, no participation.

Presence in the area costs. Anyone who wants to strengthen democratic institutions should therefore also think about the parties when distributing money - if the possibilities allow it. It takes enormous amounts of money to catch up with Ulrich Siegmund and his 700,000 Tiktok followers. If you want to set up a bouncy castle and distribute bratwursts everywhere, you also need staff, authentic members on site who show their faces and who want to save parliamentary democracy from within. The times when the AfD couldn't find any candidates are long gone. Even worse: your people are considered trustworthy.

This text first appeared in wochentaz, our weekly newspaper from the left!

Every week, wochentaz is about the world as it is – and as it could be. A left-wing weekly newspaper with a voice, attitude and the special taz view of the world. New every Saturday at the kiosk and of course by subscription.

Maybe it's not hopeless. 45 percent of AfD voters have not yet voted for the AfD out of conviction and could possibly be won over to other parties, despite historical party skepticism, especially in East Germany. This is not set in stone. For a long time, not only party ties but also civil society ties were significantly lower in the East than in the West. Both parts of the country are now almost at the same level. But is that enough for hope?

It must. Simply because of the people in Saxony-Anhalt who continue to fight and need solidarity instead of discouragement. When Kiyak asks who will still sign open letters, even if the AfD is in power, I can answer that the committed people on site can be relied upon. They show that a different way of living together, a solidarity-based, humanistic way of living together is possible. This is my point of light, no matter how dark it gets in this country.