In the relatively prosperous city of Zwickau, in Germany’s former communist east, economic uncertainty and a turbulent history are fuelling support for the far right ahead of key regional elections.
“People are afraid of losing everything they have built up over the years,” said Zwickau Mayor Constance Arndt.
To understand why “the mood is so bad” ahead of Sunday’s elections in the state of Saxony, we “may have to go back in time,” she told AFP.
According to her, the residents of Zwickau have “achieved a certain degree of prosperity” after a period of painful decline following German reunification in 1990.
The city owes its revival partly to its status as a centre for automotive manufacturing, with Volkswagen being a major employer in the region.
But recent crises, from the coronavirus pandemic to the war in Ukraine and high inflation, have led to a renewed “fear of losing,” Arndt, 47, said from her office overlooking a picturesque market square.
Some are therefore voting “in protest” for the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), according to the independent mayor of the city with around 90,000 inhabitants.
Earlier this year, thousands of people in Zwickau rose up against the far right after it emerged that several members of the anti-Islamic and anti-immigration AfD party had attended a meeting where plans for mass deportations of asylum seekers were discussed.
The demonstrations, which also took place elsewhere in Germany, were seen at the time as a rare mobilization of the so-called silent majority against the far right.
But that didn’t last long.
At the beginning of June, the AfD won the local council elections and thus became the largest faction in the Zwickau district council.
Although the AfD did not win a majority, discussions in the council are expected to become more difficult, the mayor predicted, especially regarding the financing of culture.
– Swastikas –
On a scorching August day, social worker Joerg Banitz pointed out a number of swastika plaques and signs reading “NS-Zone,” a reference to the Nazi era, that had been scrawled on walls outside the city center.
“We see that more often,” says the Zwickau resident, who was one of the organizers of the demonstrations against the far right at the beginning of this year.
Banitz is convinced that the rise of the AfD is not only due to protest votes.
The party’s “radical language and way of thinking” are now “accepted” by the public, he said, partly because conservatives from the centre-right CDU party in Saxony have adopted some of their populist positions.
“I think most people who vote for the AfD want exactly what is in the programme,” he added.
The AfD has found fertile ground in a city with an active far-right scene, Banitz said. It was in Zwickau that the three members of the NSU neo-Nazi cell, who murdered nine immigrants between 2000 and 2007, hid from police for years.
Wolfgang Wetzel, a Green councillor in Zwickau, said many residents felt overwhelmed in an increasingly complex world.
And in a region that has seen two successive authoritarian regimes, first Nazism and then communist East Germany, there is a revival of “nostalgia for the simplicity of a dictatorship, where you don’t have to make decisions,” which benefits the far right, Wetzel said.
– ‘Insecurity’ –
But the AfD rejects these interpretations.
“I think people just don’t want to be fooled anymore,” said Jonas Duenzel, AfD candidate in the Saxony elections. According to polls, the party is neck and neck with the CDU.
The 30-year-old former insurance salesman took on conservatives who he said had adopted the AfD’s calls for stricter border controls and asylum policies but had done nothing to make them happen in their five years in power.
If people vote for the AfD, “it is not because they are turning away from democracy,” as Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer of the CDU claims, but because “they have a problem with Mr Kretschmer,” he said.
The increased populist sentiment is a concern for Volkswagen, which produces fully electric vehicles at a large factory in Zwickau. The AfD has regularly opposed the push for zero-emission driving, dismissing it as a “fairy tale”.
“The discussions about the future of electric mobility are creating uncertainty” for the approximately 10,000 employees at the Zwickau plant, said Christian Sommer, head of corporate communications at VW in Saxony.
“And there is indeed fear,” he told AFP, “that these jobs could be at risk if a right-wing populist-conservative government were to emerge after the elections.”
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