Saxony-Anhalt knows a thing or two about trouble. An hour southwest of Berlin, the people in this federal state, even before it even existed as one, knew how to shake things up.
Five centuries ago it was Martin Luther, a renegade monk whose challenge to church corruption triggered a Reformation rupture, splitting western Christianity.
And a century ago the Bauhaus design school chucked out the chintz of 19th century home design, introducing an angular new world of sleek glass and steel tubing furniture – until a brutal Nazi rollback.
On Sunday, the 2.1 million people of Saxony-Anhalt have an explosive choice when they elect a new state government: hand power to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – a postwar political watershed – or give the established parties one more chance.
Final polls put the AfD riding high on 43 per cent, within shouting distance of an absolute majority in the Magdeburg state parliament.
Limping far behind, in second place on 22 per cent, is the outgoing centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that has ruled the state for nearly a quarter century.
Visiting heated gatherings across the state in the last weeks, the common denominator in the air has been the whiff of political cordite.
Take the pretty town of Wittenberg, where Martin Luther kicked off what became the Reformation in 1517.
In a former department store turned community centre, locals have gathered to discuss the choice ahead but within minutes, the mood is tense and charged.
Trying to keep the calm is local businessman Carsten Franke, a Wittenberg native and director of the SKW chemicals plant, a large employer in the town.
For him, the upcoming election is a referendum on the post-unification era and will be decided by whether Saxony-Anhalt voters fall into a trap laid by the AfD: tapping a post-unification victim narrative in eastern Germany for political gain.
Franke points out the window at the renovated Wittenberg market square and pretty historic streets. Without German unification in 1990 and at least €2 trillion in investment, all that, he says, would now look like a war film set.
Ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl’s promise of “blossoming landscapes” has come to pass in many regions across the former eastern Germany, he says, including here in Saxony-Anhalt. “There are posters hanging in Berlin advertising how nice it is here now, we can be proud of how we rolled up our sleeves and worked to build all this up,” he says.
Without mentioning the AfD by name, he warns that outside investment in the city and surrounding state could just as easily dry up again: “And we are on a sure-fire path to destroying all that again.”
Local woman Mechtild contradicts him. She is convinced that many negative characteristics of East Germany are back – and that the AfD is the best antidote to this.
“Back then I found myself in the claws of the Stasi [secret police] and lost my job,” she says. “I see all sorts of Stasi methods again in Germany today, I don’t think this is even a real democracy.”
Kathrin, a 52-year-old local woman and city guide, agrees that there is much people can be proud of in Wittenberg and Saxony-Anhalt.
“But barricaded pedestrian areas and ’knife-free zone’ signs – that is a Germany I don’t to live in, something has to change,” she says. “We have to fight to rebuild our economy and put ourselves first for a change.”
Change is what was on offer days earlier on Wittenberg market square from charismatic local AfD leader Ulrich Siegmund. The 35-year-old political TikTok star drew a huge crowd of supporters for a “citizens’ dialogue”.
There was little dialogue. Instead, everyone who waited in a lengthy queue got a quick word, a selfie and an autograph.
Siegmund’s address to the crowd was brief and hit three main points: nostalgia, confirmation and revolution.
“We want our good old safe Germany back,” he said, a nod to a decade of violent attacks, many involving asylum seekers. “I want everyone here at this event to go home with a good feeling that what we are doing here is the right thing to do. That we are on the right side and that remember this: we are the future.”
People in Saxony-Anhalt are not used to hearing such feel-good political rhetoric.
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This is one of Germany’s poorest and most conservative states, while a three-decade departure of its young people has made it one of the oldest regions in the country. In national polls, the AfD is Germany’s most popular political party with about 28 per cent support with a nativist conservative programme with populist and neoliberal components. It embraces the traditional nuclear family, promises mass deportations and a crackdown on asylum, Islam and what it calls “climate madness”.
At European level, the AfD wants to ditch both the euro and military support for Ukraine, lift economic sanctions against Moscow to restart Russian energy deliveries.
Here in Saxony-Anhalt, Siegmund has promised a cultural shift to allow home schooling, cancel public television funding the AfD views as biased, and defund Nazi concentration camp memorials.
He has supercharged the Saxony-Anhalt AfD to beyond 40 per cent in polls by going beyond standard populist tropes – of corrupt elites and criminal foreigners – to reframe locals’ economic and emotional vulnerabilities as strengths.
Some 43 per cent of eastern Germans feel like second-class citizens, according to a 2023 poll, mirroring current AfD poll numbers.
In an AfD-led Saxony-Anhalt, the party’s posters promise “anything is possible” with Siegmund as political redeemer.
German sociologist Steffen Mau, himself born in East Germany, says the AfD has “stuck a chord” with voters in Saxony-Anhalt by tapping into this feeling.
“If you say to people ‘you are not second class, you are avant-garde’, you flip this inferiority complex,” says Mau.
A second key to its success is tapping into a different understanding of democracy in eastern Germany.
Studies show that those who grew up in the former West Germany are more likely to back an idea of democracy based on electoral legitimacy, checks and balances, procedure, institutions and minority protections.
“But many easterners view democracy more in terms of absolute majority rule,” he says, “and that democracy is when those people up there do what we want.”
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That allows the AfD to ramp up the “corrupt elites” populism, drawing further strength from already chronically weak political opponents.
Saxony-Anhalt’s ruling CDU, in particular, has manoeuvred itself into an election bind by refusing to co-operate not just with the AfD but also with the third-largest party, the post-communist Left Party (Linke).
Saxony-Anhalt’s jovial CDU leader Sven Schulze is far more popular than his party, but he has been fighting an uphill battle after only taking over as state prime minister last January. Hobbling his re-election campaign still further is the state’s proximity to Berlin and the unpopular CDU chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Most of Merz’s election appearances in Saxony-Anhalt, the ones that weren’t quietly cancelled, have been closed-door affairs.
The hope is to throttle tensions over Berlin politics, in particular a pension reform plan that is unpopular in eastern Germany – including with Schulze.
What is the 47-year-old politician’s main worry if the AfD takes power in Saxony-Anhalt? That it will become an “experimental field for this party to isolate, destabilise and damage Saxony-Anhalt”.
“I don’t want that Saxony-Anhalt becomes an island in Germany with which no one wants anything to do with,” he says. “This is a party that wants to leave the euro, a party that would cut off Germany from the rest of the world.”
Many uncertainties surround Sunday’s election outcome, including the performance of smaller parties. Beyond CDU infighting, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens are on the extinction list with just 7 and 5 per cent support respectively.
A likely outcome after Sunday’s polls close is that the AfD falls short of an absolute majority, plunging Saxony-Anhalt into a period of ungovernability.
In that scenario, one of the CDU’s main election slogans in Saxony-Anhalt – “the centre will hold!” – will be put to a final test.
If Sunday’s result brings political deadlock, it could fall to Schulze to act.
One outcome could see him head a minority government with the SPD and Greens, if they are re-elected, and calling unofficially on support from the Left Party in opposition.
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“In this case he will need political kid gloves,” says Marc Rath, editor of the local Mitteldeutsche Zeitung daily. “It will be a real stress test for the CDU here to find modes of co-operation not in use anywhere else.”
Back at the Wittenberg public meeting, the mood is turning sour. German writer Lukas Rietzschel – dubbed recently the “voice of eastern German millennials” by a Swiss newspaper – says he is “a bit overwhelmed” by the atmosphere in the room, and outside, in advance of Sunday’s election.
“You could get the impression that this country is about to collapse yet, for all the challenges, so much works just fine,” says the 32-year-old. “But I guess if you think that everything is about to collapse, then it is only consequential that you vote for those who want to change everything.”