Saxony-Anhalt campaign: Greens are asked to say only good things about the AfD and CDU

The AfD leads every poll in Saxony-Anhalt by a wide margin, and the party could appoint a state premier for the first time. That prospect hangs over a campaign in which the state intelligence agency classifies the AfD’s state organization as definitively far-right.

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

The series visits events held by the six relevant parties in the campaign: the AfD, CDU, Left, SPD, Greens and BSW. Reporters traveled to Magdeburg, Osterwieck, Halle, Klötze, Schierke, Dessau and Haldensleben, speaking with experienced politicians and local campaigners in cities and rural areas.

The question posed on camera is deliberately simple: what good can you say about the political competition? The answers produce expected and unexpected results, including poisoned compliments and surprising areas of agreement. The experiment also repeatedly fails.

At a Greens event in Osterwieck, party leader Felix Banaszak invited supporters on a hike to the Brocken, the Harz’s highest mountain, before answering questions over free beer in the half-timbered town. One question concerned his decision to take the historic narrow-gauge railway back from the mountain. The Brocken railway burns about 1.5 tonnes of coal per trip, while the Greens’ Wernigerode branch has campaigned for years to electrify it.