Germany

Berlin is heading towards one of its most fragmented elections since reunification, with the radical-left Die Linke (The Left) and hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surging as establishment parties that have dominated the capital for decades lose ground.

A Forsa poll published by t-online on Saturday put Die Linke first on 22 per cent, four points ahead of both the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and AfD on 18 per cent. Die Grünen (Greens) stand at 16 per cent and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at just 12, while Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW and the liberal–centrist Free Democratic Party (FDP) would miss the 5 per cent threshold.

Early on 13 August 1961, Berliners woke up to find their city divided. The East German regime was building the Berlin Wall in a desperate attempt to stop its people from leaving. Around 2.5 million had already done just that, since the foundation of the two German states in 1949. When the Wall fell peacefully in 1989, the exodus wasn’t supposed to resume. But it did, and on a devastating scale.

Sixty-five years on from when the wall went up, Germany’s eastern regions are trapped in a depopulation spiral. Nearly a quarter of former East Germans have moved west or abroad since German reunification. Most are young, well-educated and female. That’s left behind a region that is now Germany’s oldest, with its birth rate among the lowest, and with many of its communities watching schools, playgrounds, clubs and traditions slowly disappear.

German actors, sports personalities, business leaders, and NGOs are teaming up to try to dissuade voters in Saxony-Anhalt from voting for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), to prevent the party from winning an outright majority in the state election on September 6.

The campaign, titled Wahre Heimatliebe ist (“True love of home is”), features actors including Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Anna Schudt, and Max Simonischek, alongside figures from academia, business, and sport.

The organisers say an AfD majority and an AfD-led state government would have “serious social and economic consequences” for Saxony-Anhalt and beyond. They are calling on voters to participate in the election and support “democratic parties.”

Germany’s police union has called on officers to defy any “unconstitutional” orders if the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes to power.

Sven Hüber, the deputy president of the Union of Police, compared the hard-Right party to the Nazis, and said it was incumbent upon officers to uphold the constitution.

“You can’t swear an oath on the constitution and ally with its enemies at the same time,” wrote Mr Hüber in the lead article in the police union’s magazine.

I think Sven needs some remedial democracy lessons.

The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has surged to a record 42% in a new poll in Saxony-Anhalt, putting the party 20 percentage points ahead of the governing centre-right CDU just four weeks before the state election.

The Insa survey, published on Monday, August 10th, puts the AfD up one percentage point from its previous result, while the CDU of Prime Minister Sven Schulze has fallen two points to 22%.

For the time being, there is still widespread agreement among all democratic parties in Germany: Cooperating with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) remains out of the question. However, whether this will remain the case is becoming increasingly uncertain. The established parties have so far been unable to halt the AfD’s surge in the polls over recent months.