Ulrich Siegmund is the friendly face of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt. He speaks slowly, smiles permanently and repeats his messages with an almost obsessive discipline. He has made moderation in forms one of his best political weapons. And he has, above all, one quality: he is a born salesman. "I love selling," he himself confessed in a business magazine.
According to the first projection by public television ZDF, the far-right party obtains 44% of the votes, more than double the 20.8% obtained five years ago, and leaves the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at a huge distance, which sinks to 18.5%.
Now he sells politics. It sells optimism and oriental nostalgia. Born after the fall of the Wall, he sells the nostalgia of a country he never got to know and that he promises to recover: a safe, prosperous and cohesive Germany, where neighbors helped each other, children could play in the street until nightfall and people felt part of a community. During the campaign he toured Saxony-Anhalt on the back of an old Simson, the small two-stroke motorcycle associated with daily life in the GDR, now painted blue, the color of the AfD.
Before selling politics, he sold products and services and even marketed aroma diffusion systems for stores, nursing homes and other establishments. Even fragrances aimed at reducing the "potential for aggression" on public transport. Now the product is much more ambitious: changing not only the atmosphere of a room, but that of an entire country.
Much of the 36-year-old Siegmund's campaign has fit on the screen of a mobile phone. Become a TikTok star, he has more than 850,000 followers and his videos have accumulated 28 million views since June. According to a study by the University of Potsdam, he alone accounted for almost two-thirds of the reproductions of political content from Saxony-Anhalt analyzed during the campaign. While the videos of his Christian Democrat rival, Sven Schulze, reached an average of 5,600 views, those of Siegmund reached 214,000.
Trained as a trader
It's not a coincidence. Siegmund trained as a merchant, worked for years in sales and studied Business Administration and Economic Psychology remotely. From those studies he drew a lesson that he now applies precisely to politics: simple messages work when they are repeated. He also learned that selling is not just about placing a product, but about causing a sensation.
And that is precisely what he does in politics. He calls this idealized past a heile Welt, a healthy world. It is the exact reverse of the Saxony-Anhalt that he draws in his speeches: insecure, impoverished and abandoned by those who govern it.
He came to politics early. At the age of 18 he joined the CDU, militancy that today he presents almost as a sin of youth. The euro crisis ended up distancing him from the Christian Democrats and he ended up in the AfD when it was still essentially a eurosceptic party. Since 2016 he has been a regional deputy and since 2022 he has led, together with Oliver Kirchner, the parliamentary group of his party.
PANDEMIC INFLUENCER
His jump on the networks began during the pandemic, when he intensified his opposition to coronavirus restrictions and gained hundreds of thousands of followers. Since then he has perfected the formula: short sentences, repetition, good humor and a staging that seeks to erase any distance between politician and voter.
Siegmund is not the great ideologue of the regional AfD either. That role corresponds more to leaders like Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the main authors of his program. Others elaborate the ideology; Siegmund knows how to sell it. His talent lies in wrapping radical positions in everyday language and a semblance of normality.
That normality has limits. Asked in an interview if the Holocaust had been the worst crime in the history of humanity, he responded that he could not "arrogate the right to judge it" because he did not know all of human history. Nor did he want to condemn followers who chanted his last name, "Siegmund," with the cadence of the Nazi salute "Sieg Heil."
The content, however, remains that of a formation that regional intelligence services classify as a confirmed far-right organization. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt calls for a "deportation and remigration offensive." Siegmund, the salesman, makes his face.
