Ulrich Siegmund: the smiling face of the AfD who seeks to be the first far-right president of a German state since the Second World War

His constant smile and good humor have become his hallmark. Ulrich Siegmund has changed the image of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD), putting aside anger and anger to focus on optimistic messages such as “everything will be fine”, the motto of a successful election campaign in which people stood in long lines to take selfies with him and get an autograph.

This 35-year-old man, born in the small town of Havelberg, in Saxony-Anhalt, three weeks after German reunification, in October 1990, and with a large media presence, could become the first far-right president in a German federal state after the Second World War.

But his career was not focused on politics from the beginning. After completing professional training as a commercial technician in wholesale and foreign trade, he studied economic psychology and business administration. At the age of 23, he founded a company dedicated to the marketing of air fresheners and other types of aromatization systems. However, he was interested in politics from a very young age.

Siegmund joined the CDU at the age of 18 and six years later he left to join the AfD in 2014, a party created a year earlier. At that time it was an anti-euro formation that emerged after the 2008 economic crisis and the EU financial bailouts. In fact, the euro rescue policy followed by the CDU is what, according to him, led him to leave the conservative party. Two years later, at the age of 26, in 2016, he entered the regional parliament of Saxony-Anhalt for the first time with the AfD. Since August 2022, he has co-chaired the AfD parliamentary group in said Parliament together with Oliver Kirchner. In 2025, he was elected AfD's main candidate for the regional elections that were held last Sunday and in which he obtained 44% of the votes. AfD, a party that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the secret services in the interior – classifies as clearly far-right, was on the verge of an absolute majority.

One of the most popular politicians

With more than 670,000 followers on Instagram and more than 900,000 on TikTok, he is one of the most popular politicians in Germany. It is said that as a teenager he was “the most popular boy in high school.” He usually appears friendly, carefree and close to people. He poses tirelessly with his hundreds of followers and during the election campaign he opted for family parties, dialogues with citizens and face-to-face meetings. A tactic that has brought him great success. International media often describe him as “the smiling face” of the AfD. Siegmund is married and has a daughter. His wife, Julia, has sometimes appeared before television cameras. She participated in the VOX channel's bridal docu-reality Zwischen Tüll & Tränen (Between Tulle and Tears), where she chose her wedding dress for the wedding with Siegmund. In 2017, he left the Catholic Church. In her words, she carries her values ​​“in her heart,” but rejects the German institution behind her.

The politician advocates, among other things, a much more restrictive immigration policy, deportations and a fundamental change in regional policy. In his environment there are trusted people who actively participated in the Heimattreue Deutsche Youth (HDJ), an organization that was banned in 2009 for its “affinity with National Socialism” and that sought to educate children to become “National Socialist freedom fighters” and that taught minors “racial science.” One of them is called Patrick Harr, press spokesman for the parliamentary group and Siegmund's right-hand man. But for Siegmund those were “sins of youth”, “prescribed long ago”.

The leader has no problems praising the YouTuber Matthäus Westfal, alias Aktivist-Mann. “There are many good people who inform.” Siegmund does not seem to be bothered by the fact that this live content broadcaster was on the front line in the attempted assault on the German Parliament in 2020 during a massive demonstration in the context of the Covid pandemic and is known for his contacts with Holocaust deniers.

And then there is Sebastian Schmidtke, former federal vice president of the National Democratic Party of Germany, or NPD—today Die Heimat (The Fatherland)—, a formation close to neo-Nazism that is now also dedicated to broadcasting live content and was accredited at the AfD federal congress. Siegmund seems to have confidence with the convicted neo-Nazi. Furthermore, when asked how he himself values ​​National Socialism and the Holocaust, and whether he would also characterize the years from 1933 to 1945 as "the worst crime against humanity," Siegmund responds evasively: "I don't dare judge it. Because I can't take stock of all of humanity."

Scandals do not affect him

Likewise, the scandals do not seem to affect him. He is deeply involved in his party's nepotism case. His father works for a member of the Saxony-Anhalt Bundestag. He had previously worked for other AfD deputies. Siegmund defended, in principle, the hiring of family members and party colleagues, pointing out, among other things, that the AfD found it difficult to find good professionals, since anyone who works for the party is stigmatized.

Despite this, its popularity did not diminish at all, but continued to increase. Perhaps also, as Der Spiegel analyzed, because "AfD has long made distrust of state institutions part of its political strategy. Its own media universe reinforces the message: 'we no longer believe you, we only believe ourselves.'" Nor was it affected by having been present at the controversial meeting of right-wing extremists in Potsdam in November 2023 in which a master plan to expel millions of people from Germany was outlined and which was uncovered by Correctiv, a German non-profit investigative media.