Saxony-Anhalt campaign: BSW supporters are allowed to say only good things about the CDU and Greens

The AfD is leading every poll in Saxony-Anhalt by a wide margin and could, for the first time, provide a state’s minister-president. The prospect is especially striking because Germany’s domestic intelligence service classifies the party’s state branch as confirmed far-right.

Yet the party’s campaign events resemble folk festivals. Top candidate Ulrich Siegmund struggles to keep up with autograph requests after hours of selfies. Other parties are so focused on fighting off the AfD that they have little energy left to make their differences with one another clear.

To test those divisions, campaign events for all six relevant parties were visited in Magdeburg, Osterwieck, Halle, Klötze, Schierke, Dessau and Haldensleben. Campaigners and ordinary supporters were asked what they could say positively about their political competitors. The answers produced expected responses, surprising common ground and compliments so poisoned that the exercise repeatedly broke down.

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What good things can you actually think of about your political competitors?

The BSW event in Dessau offered a particularly charged setting. Sahra Wagenknecht spoke on the market square on the same evening that Siegmund appeared in the city. Antifascist protesters gathered, while right-wing streamers accompanying the AfD campaign also arrived. Among the crowd was Thomas Hornauer, known as “King Thomas,” a conspiracy ideologue and esoteric figure who says he has an “intimate love relationship” with Wagenknecht and Siegmund.

Hornauer, a former telephone-sex entrepreneur, describes himself as a representative of the 30% of non-voters and the unvaccinated. The encounter illustrated the atmosphere surrounding a campaign in which political hostility is widespread, while attempts to identify shared ground remain difficult.

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intimate love relationship