The citizen mobilization to vote this Sunday in the elections in the German land of Saxony-Anhalt promises to be one of the highest in its history. AfD, the far-right party, aspires to an absolute majority that would give it power in a German state for the first time. A lot is at stake, both for its voters and its detractors, and the first participation data demonstrate it: at noon, 34.7% of the 1.6 million people called to the polls had already voted, far above the previous elections, in 2021, when at that time 22.4% had registered their vote. In that year participation reached 60%.
Election day is passing without reported incidents, with a huge police presence since Saturday in the state capital, Magdeburg. Law enforcement forces from other regions of Germany have also settled in the city to avoid potential altercations. An anti-AfD demonstration was held on Saturday, bringing together around 15,000 people, according to organisers.
“We have to change now or never, this country is going to ruin,” says Birgit, a 67-year-old woman who voted for the AfD at a polling station in Magdeburg. Both she and her husband do not want their last name to be published. Both say they would vote for the CSU, the Bavarian Christian Socialists, “but since they are not present in Saxony-Anhalt, we opted for the AfD.” There are two reasons, as they explain, to justify their vote. The first is that society is increasingly poorer. “In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) I was able to have five children because of the excellent state assistance network, this is now impossible,” says Birgit, who was a kindergarten teacher. When Germany was reunified, he lost his job and opened a restaurant, until his retirement.
The second reason, say Birgit and her husband, is the excess of foreigners: “There are some who are well off, who work and don't make a living, like the Czechs.” Asked if they approve, for example, the presence of Spaniards in their city, they admit that they are not clear. Saxony-Anhalt has one of the lowest rates in Germany of foreign population, 7% of the total compared to the country's average, which is 15%.
A few minutes behind Birgit and her husband, Norman Smudzenski, 42, arrived to vote, wearing a T-shirt with an anti-fascist logo. He only specifies that he will vote for the left and that the ideal result of the day is that, the more parties overcome the barrier of 5% of the votes, the minimum to win a seat, the more fragmented the regional parliament will be and therefore the fewer options of governing the AfD and its candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, will have. Polls have given up to 43% of the vote in favor of the radicals, bordering on what would be an absolute majority in seats.
If the AfD does not obtain the absolute majority of deputies, it is likely that an alliance of the rest of the parties will support the CDU candidate, Sven Schulze, to revalidate the presidency of the land. The extreme right has focused its last days of the campaign on asking for a high turnout to prevent the so-called cordon sanitaire from leaving them out of power again.
The problem would be bringing the Christian Democrats of the CDU and the leftist party Die Linke, bitter rivals, to an agreement. “The CDU is no solution,” adds Smudzenski, “during this legislature they have carried out anti-social policies that have only made the AfD right.”
