A right-wing extremist is poised to win Sunday’s (1 September) local election in the German state of Thuringia, eying the deposition of prime minister amid growing dissatisfaction with the established parties.
The two German states of Saxony and Thuringia are heading to the polls on Sunday to vote on the new state parliament. While the far-right AfD party is expected to get substantial gains, their rise is especially visible in Thuringia, where the party is led by the far-right extremist Björn Höcke.
According to the polls, Höcke’s party is expected to win a landslide victory with around 30%—almost three times as many votes as all three of the coalition parties in Berlin combined—and around 10% ahead of the conservative CDU, which is polling in second place with 21%.
Höcke, who once said that it would be a “big problem” if Hitler was portrayed as the “absolute evil” in German political discourse, is aiming to become the party’s first-ever prime minister in one of the German states.
In both Saxony and Thuringia, the regional branches of the AfD are considered even more right-wing than the federal party. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency—the Verfassungsschutz—has categorised them as ‘definitely right-wing extremists’, while the federal AfD is so far only under suspicion of being extremist.
Höcke has already been convicted twice for using prohibited Nazi slogans. In July, the regional court in Halle found that he had employed the slogan “Everything for Germany,” originally used by Adolf Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA), during a November 2023 election campaign rally.
Furthermore, a court decided in 2019 that the labelling of Höcke as a “fascist” has “a verifiable factual basis” and is thus in line with German law and does not constitute defamation.
Cordon sanitaire and political dilemmas
All the established parties have vowed not to join a coalition with the AfD in Thuringia. However, forming a coalition will be tricky.
While the liberal FDP and the Greens are expected to fail to reach the 5% threshold to make it into parliament, the SPD is only polling at 6%, which means that the CDU will have to rely on one of the parties on the political fringes to build a government.
The far-left Die Linke and its spin-off of the BSW, which are polling at around 32% combined, would be uneasy partners for the CDU, which is heavily at odds with their left-wing ideology.
“‘The democratic parties of the political centre in our country are slowly losing the basis of the citizens’ trust,” CDU helm Friedrich Merz said at a press conference on Tuesday.
An alternative option could be building a minority government following the election, which could switch between the support of the far left and the far right on a case-to-case basis. There has already been a precedent for this, as the AfD and the CDU voted together several times in the past term.
Furthermore, the incumbent coalition of the far-left prime minister Bodo Ramelow is also based on a minority government.
However, the recent deadly knife attack by a Syrian refugee in Solingen could further exacerbate the situation, as the AfD is likely to profit from the current salience of the migration topic and could thus perform better than anticipated at the upcoming election.
If the AfD were to enter the government, as Höcke hopes, the EU would also have tools to curb the AfD’s grip on the Eastern German state.
According to an analysis by the Jacques Delors Centre, the European Commission could apply the rule of law mechanism, which it famously used in the case of Hungary in 2022, to the German state.
Such a toolbox could include preventive measures like rule of law reports, corrective measures like infringement procedures, and budgetary measures, which could see the €1.5 billion heavy EU funds for Thuringia withheld from states that violate fundamental EU principles.