The cultural break marked by the AfD's election victory in Saxony-Anhalt cannot be fully understood if one only looks at its result of 43.8 percent. To do this, you have to break down the map a little more finely and look at the constituencies around smaller cities such as Staßfurt, Querfurt, Bernburg, Merseburg, Eisleben or Zeitz, in which the AfD received more than 50 percent of the second votes.
It is primarily the cities in the south of the country, which were prosperous in previous centuries but are now particularly plagued by the demographic crisis, where the AfD achieved its best results. The party performed significantly weaker in the two large cities of Magdeburg and Halle, and somewhat weaker in the more rural areas in the north as well as around cities with scenic and tourist attractions such as Quedlinburg or Wernigerode in the northern Harz.
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It is also informative to look at which direct candidates the local population sent to the state parliament: In the Zerbst constituency, in which the AfD won 46.9 percent of the second votes, the AfD candidate Phillipp-Anders Rau was directly elected to the state parliament with 48.1 percent of the first votes. So almost every second voter voted for an applicant who was not uncontroversial within the AfD, but was nevertheless a candidate, who managed to get a place at university with a fake high school diploma (average 1.0 instead of the actual 3.5), who appeared in porn films, was convicted of theft, admitted in court to a previous cocaine addiction and, according to media reports, has already gone bankrupt.
Ritual with animal horns and Hitler Youth song
In the north of Saxony-Anhalt, AfD candidate Simon Lansmann was elected in the Salzwedel constituency with 41.6 percent of the vote. Lansmann is currently under investigation because he is said to have participated in the continuation of the banned neo-Nazi-anti-Semitic “Artgemeinschaft”. In June, a pagan ceremony for the summer solstice took place on Lansmann's private property in Gardelegen, in which, according to a "Spiegel" report, a ritual with animal horns also played a role. A Hitler Youth song is also said to have been sung. The authorities suspect that the forbidden “species community” was revived at the meeting, from which Lansmann subsequently distanced himself, as did his party colleague Sebastian Koch, who was present there and who is also being investigated.
Koch was directly elected to the state parliament in the neighboring Gardelegen-Klötze constituency with 41.5 percent of the first votes. The 2023 report by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution said that the 39-year-old AfD politician had appeared "constantly in right-wing extremist contexts" since 2012 and had taken part in a large number of events such as "heroes' commemorations", wreath-layings or concerts in the neo-Nazi scene.
In 2023, the authority also upgraded the regional association to a “secure right-wing extremist effort”. The party had previously been assessed as a suspected case. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the state of Saxony-Anhalt justified the upgrade, among other things, by the fact that the Saxony-Anhalt AfD had become further radicalized over the course of the corona pandemic. In 2016, the AfD entered the state parliament for the first time. Since then she has shown no moderation. Even in the numerous intra-party conflicts in the regional association, there was never a rebellion against the extremist currents in its own ranks, which ranged from the identitarian to the neo-Nazi spectrum.
