Germany’s populist AfD party shocked the political establishment in the country after securing its first-ever district council election victory on Sunday despite all other major parties banding together to support the other candidate.
In what the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has described as the beginning of a “political earthquake”, its candidate for district administrator in Sonneberg, Robert Sesselmann was elected on Sunday with 52.8 per cent of the vote, besting Jürgen Köpper of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The victory for the AfD represents the first time that a politician from the right-wing populist party will be in a governing position in the country since the party’s founding in 2013. The election win also comes in the face of steep opposition from the German political establishment, with every other national party calling on their supporters to back the CDU candidate.
dpatop – 25 June 2023, Thuringia, Sonneberg: Björn Höcke (l), chairman of the AfD Thuringia and Tino Chrupalla, AfD federal chairman (r) congratulate the winner of the Thuringian district Sonneberg, Robert Sesselmann (AfD, M) in the garden of a restaurant. Photo: Martin Schutt/dpa (Photo by Martin Schutt/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The AfD leader in the local state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, said according to state broadcaster Deutsche Welle, that the win in Sonneberg demonstrated the growing popularity of the anti-mass migration party.
“And then we’ll prepare for the state elections in the east, where we can really create a political earthquake,” Höcke said in reference to the upcoming state parliament elections in Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony.
Amid the widespread failures of the left-wing ‘Traffic light’ coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, from the handling of the Chinese coronavirus, the failures of the green agenda to buffer losses in Russian energy, and the persistent levels of crippling inflation, the populist AfD party has capitalised politically to such an extent that they are now polling ahead of Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrat Party (SPD).
The rise of the populists has resulted in a panic amongst the German establishment, with Thuringia’s Social Democrat Interior Minister, Georg Maier, describing the victory in Sonneberg as “an alarm signal for all democratic forces.”
Ironically, despite the legacy media, political elites, and even the country’s security services branding the party as “far-right” and “extremists”, there have been suggestions from Berlin to ban the party outright rather than to address the issues, such as the negative impacts of mass migration.
Earlier this month, the German Institute for Human Rights (DIMR), told lawmakers that a ban against the AfD would be justified. Without irony, the progressive government-funded organisation argued that a ban could be imposed on the party because it allegedly stands against the “free democratic basic order”. The DIMR went on to claim that the AfD’s political philosophy is “based on the tyranny of National Socialism”, a claim that the party expressly rejects.