Posters in the crowd at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate read “Fascism is no alternative” and “History has its eyes on us.” The rally, held on a Monday after the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won its best-ever state result, was peaceful. The mood was anything but calm.
Police counted 5,000 people. Organisers put the number above 14,000. Smaller protests formed in Potsdam, where hundreds turned out, and in Münster, Göttingen, Dresden, Aachen, Bamberg, Darmstadt and Halberstadt, according to local media. In Halle, the second-largest city in Saxony-Anhalt, leftist groups and civil society organisations have kept a protest camp running since election day.
A result that shocked
The AfD took nearly 44 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, the best showing for a nativist party there since the Nazi period. It fell just short of an absolute majority. Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the memorial at the former Buchenwald concentration camp, called the result a “disgrace that makes you furious and stunned” and told the Berlin crowd that an AfD government in the state “should not be accepted in silence.”
Max Schneller, a 17-year-old member of the Linke from Saxony-Anhalt, promised that activists would resist any attempt by an AfD government to single out minorities. “We will not start categorising our neighbours according to their origin, religion or skin colour,” he said to loud applause.
The AfD is still three votes short of what it needs to govern under its candidate, Ulrich Siegmund. He is hoping to win over dissenters from other parties. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has listed the party’s state chapter as rightwing extremist since 2023.
Two more votes on 20 September
Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, on the Baltic coast, vote on 20 September, less than two weeks away.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the AfD leads in voter intent polls at about 35 percent. But the Social Democrats of state premier Manuela Schwesig have climbed back over the summer and now poll above 30 percent.
Berlin looks less settled. The Christian Democrats, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, hold a thin lead at about 20 percent. The Linke, which has built its campaign around rising housing costs, is close behind, with the AfD next. The Social Democrats and Greens both sit in the mid-teens. Merz’s record unpopularity is reported to have weighed on voters in Saxony-Anhalt.
Merz has vowed to stay in office and push through a package of painful reforms. His argument is that the AfD can only be beaten by getting Germany’s economy moving again and fixing its strained welfare system. His junior coalition partner, the SPD, has signalled it may back away from some of the least popular measures to shore up support. Analysts say that dispute could shake the coalition further.
