Reiner Haseloff and the AfD: “Everything Is Questioned, Everything Is Threatening, Everyone Is an Enemy”

“Is this still your country?” Reiner Haseloff is asked over breakfast in his home city of Wittenberg. “Yes, this is my country,” he replies. “You only have this one.” For a moment, he looks lost around the table.

He chose the Hotel Luther, now called Martas, for the morning-after breakfast following the catastrophe in Magdeburg. Even the name feels uncertain in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, the city officially identified that way on the railway station signs. Berlin is only 40 minutes away by high-speed train, yet the article asks whether anything in Saxony-Anhalt still feels secure.

The questions reach Haseloff’s party, the CDU, which ruled the state for almost 25 years. Haseloff governed as minister-president for 15 of those years before handing over power and office last year to his protégé Sven Schulze. Schulze has now been voted out.

The article presents Haseloff as the last figure who could hold back the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, using the CDU he both loves and curses. It asks why the AfD’s success feels like a personal defeat for him and what he sees behind the crisis of the political center and the rise of the AfD and BSW. Despite those setbacks, the piece says Haseloff has not given up on his state.

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Yes, this is my country. You only have this one.