In the relatively wealthy city of Zwickau in Germany’s former communist east, economic uncertainty and a turbulent history have led to the extreme right gaining popularity ahead of an important state election.

“People are afraid of losing everything they have built up over the years,” said Zwickau’s mayor Constance Arndt.

On Sunday, voters in two former East German states will go to the polls. It could be a bad evening for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is expected to make major gains.

The elections in Thuringia and Saxony come just a week after the suspected knife attack in Solingen, in which three people were stabbed to death, including a Syrian asylum seeker. The attack shocked Germany and sparked a bitter debate about immigration.

According to opinion polls, the anti-immigration AfD is the strongest party in Thuringia with around 30 percent, while in Saxony it is neck and neck with the conservative CDU for first place.

Even if it wins the election, the AfD is unlikely to come to power in either federal state, as the other parties have ruled out working with it to form a majority.

Nevertheless, with a view to next year’s federal election, the result would be a humiliating defeat for Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) and the other parties in his governing coalition, the Greens and the liberal FDP.

In order to understand why “the mood is so bad” in Saxony ahead of Sunday’s election, one “may have to take a look into the past,” said Arndt.

Prosperity and decline

The inhabitants of Zwickau had “achieved a certain level of prosperity” after a period of painful decline following German reunification in 1990, she said.

The city owes its boom in part to its status as a center of automobile production, with Volkswagen being a major employer in the region. But recent crises, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine and high inflation, have triggered a renewed “fear of loss,” says Ms. Arndt.

Some would therefore vote for the AfD “out of protest,” added the non-partisan mayor of the city of 90,000 inhabitants.

At the beginning of the year, thousands of people demonstrated in Zwickau against the extreme right after it became known that some members of the anti-Islam and anti-immigration AfD had taken part in a meeting at which plans for the mass deportation of asylum seekers were discussed.

The demonstrations, which also took place throughout Germany, were seen as a rare mobilization of the so-called silent majority against right-wing extremism. But it did not last long.

At the beginning of June, the AfD won a local election and became the strongest faction in the Zwickau district council.

Even if the AfD did not achieve a majority, discussions in the city council are likely to become more difficult, especially with regard to cultural funding, the mayor predicted.

On a scorching hot day in August, social worker Jörg Banitz pointed out several swastika slogans and inscriptions reading “NS-Zone” – an allusion to the Nazi era – that had been painted on walls outside the city center.

“We observe this frequently,” says the Zwickau native, who was one of the organizers of the demonstrations against the far-right earlier this year.

Banitz believes that the rise of the AfD is not only due to protest votes.

“Radical language”

The party’s “radical language and way of thinking” is now “accepted” by the public, he said. This also contributes to the fact that conservatives from Saxony’s center-right CDU party have adopted some of its populist positions.

“I think most people who vote for the AfD want exactly what is in the program,” he added.

The AfD has found fertile ground in a city with an active right-wing extremist scene, said Banitz. In Zwickau, the three members of the neo-Nazi cell NSU, who murdered nine people with a migrant background between 2000 and 2007, hid from the police for years.

Zwickau city councillor Wolfgang Wetzel (Greens) said that many local citizens felt overwhelmed in an increasingly complex world.

And in a region that has experienced two successive authoritarian regimes – National Socialism and then the communist GDR – according to Wetzel, there is a “nostalgia for the simplicity of a dictatorship in which one does not have to make decisions”, which benefits the extreme right.

However, the AfD rejects these interpretations.

“I think people just don’t want to be cheated anymore,” says Jonas Dünzel, AfD candidate for the Saxony election.

The 30-year-old former insurance agent attacked the conservatives, who he said had adopted the AfD’s demands for stricter border controls and a better asylum policy, but had done nothing to put these demands into practice during their five-year term in office.

If people voted for the AfD, it was “not because they are turning away from democracy,” as Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) claimed, but because they “have a problem with Mr. Kretschmer,” he said.

The increasing populist mood is a concern for Volkswagen, which produces fully electric vehicles at its large plant in Zwickau. The AfD regularly rails against the push for emission-free driving and dismisses it as a “fairy tale”.

“The discussions about the future of electromobility are causing uncertainty” among the approximately 10,000 employees at the Zwickau plant, said Christian Sommer, Head of Volkswagen Corporate Communications Saxony.

“And there is indeed a fear,” he said, “that these jobs could be at risk if the election results in a right-wing populist conservative government.”