This Sunday, voters in Germany’s former Communist East will elect the next regional government of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the country’s 16 federal states.
Polling at about 40 per cent, AfD, a Kremlin-friendly populist party, is projected to win the elections by a landslide and trigger a crisis of confidence in chancellor Friedrich Merz’s fragile government. His Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is on about 23 per cent in the state.
Read more here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/09/03/how-nostalgia-for-russian-rule-could-hand-afd-keys-germany/
Regional elections may not be seismic events in Britain, but in Germany this is the most pivotal one in decades.
The AfD, which is classified by the German intelligence services as a Right-wing extremist group, is tantalisingly close to winning an absolute majority of seats in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament and forming its first regional government.
Sunday’s vote could be the first time that a radical Right-wing party has controlled a German state since 1945.
An AfD state government would control education, state intelligence, asylum and policing in Saxony-Anhalt, a former industrial heartland of coal mines, Soviet-era bases and medieval castles.
The party has promised mass deportations, a ban on LGBT symbols, the segregation of German children and refugees in classrooms, and closer ties with Moscow if it takes power.
But even if it misses out on a majority in Saxony-Anhalt, the party sees this campaign as a stepping stone towards its true goal: total victory at the next federal election.
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Chapters
00:00 – Intro
00:50 – AfD Voters Speak
02:01 – Anti-AfD Protest
02:43 – Ulrich Siegmund Interview
04:48 – Analysis of the Rally
05:10 – Protesters clash with the AfD
06:22 – Dessau-Rosslau and the ‘birth emergency’
08:02 – Criticism of the AfD
09:37 – Nostalgia for East Germany
11:03 – Hans-Thomas Tilschneider Interview
13:30 – Analysis and Outro
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