Fond memories of life in Soviet era may propel far-Right party to landslide win in eastern regional election

James Rothwell

Berlin Correspondent, in Jerichow

Ralf Kiesewetter finds it odd that so many Ukrainian refugees hate Vladimir Putin. If anything, he says with morbid cynicism, they should be thanking the Russian president.

“All Ukrainian citizens should be grateful to the Russians for starting the war in 2022,” Mr Kiesewetter, 61, tells The Telegraph. “Those from western Ukraine have been trying for years to get into the European Union. Now they have the opportunity.”

It is the kind of remark that one would expect to hear late at night in a Moscow bar, or perhaps blaring out of a Russian state television channel.

But Mr Kiesewetter is no Russian: he is a German, and a proud one at that, who hopes voting for the hard-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party will put his country back on good terms with its old Soviet masters.

This Sunday, voters in Germany’s former Communist East will elect the next regional government of Saxony-Anhalt, one of the country’s 16 federal states.

Polling at about 40 per cent, AfD, a Kremlin-friendly populist party, is projected to win the elections by a landslide and trigger a crisis of confidence in chancellor Friedrich Merz’s fragile government. His Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is on about 23 per cent in the state.

Regional elections may not be seismic events in Britain, but in Germany this is the most pivotal in decades.

The AfD, which is classified by the German intelligence services as a suspected Right-wing extremist group, is tantalisingly close to winning an absolute majority of seats in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament and forming its first regional government.

Sunday’s vote could be the first time that a radical Right-wing party has controlled a German state since 1945.

An AfD state government would control education, state intelligence, asylum and policing in Saxony-Anhalt, a former industrial heartland of coal mines, Soviet-era bases and medieval castles.

The party has promised mass deportations, a ban on LGBT symbols, the segregation of German children and refugees in classrooms, and closer ties with Moscow if it takes power.

But even if it misses out on a majority in Saxony-Anhalt, the party sees this campaign as a stepping stone towards its true goal: total victory at the next federal election.

‘Life was better under Russians’

Fulminating about immigrants and railing against “woke” culture have always been vote winners for the AfD, which came second in last year’s federal election and is now the de facto opposition.

But it is nostalgia for the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Soviet satellite state of East Germany from 1949-1990, which has struck a chord with voters in Saxony-Anhalt.

Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s candidate for state president, has spent his campaign zooming around on a sky-blue Simson moped, the GDR-era equivalent of a beloved British Morris Minor.

The 35-year-old former perfume salesman also likes to sing the GDR national anthem Risen from Ruins – a ballad of fascist terror giving way to Communist glory – at campaign rallies.

It is stirring stuff for voters in East Germany, where many towns still have a Lenin Street, at least one decaying Cold War-era military base and a general sense that Russia has been good to them.

As Mr Kiesewetter, who is unemployed, puts it: “The Russians brought us peace in 1945. And they didn’t start the [Second World] War, they finished it, which many don’t understand or don’t want to understand.

“I can’t just see them as an enemy… It would be an advantage for us if we had close relations with Russia again.”

‘Ukrainians are freeloaders’

Mr Kiesewetter’s view is widely held at the AfD’s “Grillfest” election event, a rally of sausages and speeches in the town of Jerichow near the River Elbe.

“I am a child of the GDR,” says Kristina Riegler, 49, a nursery school teacher who is carrying a heart-shaped placard with Mr Siegmund’s face on the front.

“And in the GDR we did not have much. If we wanted oranges and bananas, we had to stand in line for them.”

“But we did well,” she adds firmly. “We received support from the state, we had more security – and almost everyone had a job.”

In stark contrast with the sparse but secure life under Soviet rule, she feels Germany has become a country inundated with immigrants who receive preferential treatment over citizens.

“May I speak openly? As Germans, we have to fight for everything, and the non-Germans get everything handed to them,” she says. “We are, one could say, outnumbered and as a woman you can feel afraid to go out at night.”

Bernd Pfeffer, 68, a baker, is particularly weary of Ukrainian refugees coming to East Germany. “All these young Ukrainian menwho are here because they didn’t want to go to war, they are freeloaders,” he says.

“We pay for it all with our tax money and yet there are pensioners here who have to work on the side because the pension is not enough. Many are fed up.”

AfD leader: Russian lessons in, Ukraine support out

When Mr Siegmund glides into the Grillfest to give a speech, his admirers form a queue to have their “Ulrich” T-shirts and heart placards signed.

“Welcome to Germany!” he exclaims in English to The Telegraph with a fierce handshake, once an interview has been negotiated via his father.

“People are fed up, they don’t want to be patronised any more and above all they no longer want to be lied to by politicians,” he says, switching to German when asked why his countrymen are abandoning traditional parties.

“Uncontrolled migration has not worked at all. We have a great many migrants on social benefits and welfare, which costs us a lot of money, and many do not adhere to our rules, laws and culture,” he says.

“We must distinguish between those who want to participate and those who want to exploit us.”

As for arms deliveries to Ukraine – they have to go. “We’ve spent billions when we already have problems in this country, people didn’t want it here and we haven’t saved a single life,” he says. “On the contrary, the war keeps on going and achieving nothing.”

This young state leader has an air of frenetic energy, and he has sharp wits – earlier he had had a verbal joust with a heckler who claimed Mr Siegmund wasn’t Right-wing enough.

Mr Siegmund is also enjoying his newfound notoriety in the German press, having been described as “Germany’s most dangerous man” by Spiegel on its front cover.

The stunt backfired: copies of the magazine signed by Mr Siegmund are collectors’ items at rallies.

As the Grillfest ends, Mr Siegmund has one last stop: a counter-demonstration across the road where anti-AfD campaigners hold placards describing the party as a neo-Nazi movement.

Unusually for a senior AfD figure – many have a siege mentality towards their opponents – he debates with the crowd for 40 minutes on transgender children and the state of German democracy.

Afterwards, one of the anti-AfDers, Flo Heinz, shakes hands with Mr Siegmund, even though it is clear the pair find each other’s views repulsive.

“What I completely do not understand,” Mr Heinz, 35, tells The Telegraph, “is they think that Russia is this great ally of ours.

“Obviously it was the case in the past, but how can you support someone [like Putin] who just starts a war out of nothing for his Caesarean ego?”

He is disturbed by the idea that the AfD could form a state government in Saxony-Anhalt, which would allow it to control the school curriculum and state police.

“Given our history, it’s quite problematic,” he says, alluding to the Nazis’ kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church) doctrine and the Gestapo secret police.

“It’s almost 100 years ago now that we had that happen, [but] people just blindly follow whatever these guys say. Like, they could tell you the sky is green and they would not disagree.”

“I consider the AfD to be very dangerous for German democracy, and if it came to power here that could lead on to the federal republic and it should be prevented,” agrees Annalena Ficker, a 25-year-old law student, speaking in the nearby city of Halle.

Defending that democracy, as they see it, is Mr Merz’s CDU. But in this state, the CDU is running nearly 20 points behind the AfD.

Sven Schulze, the CDU state president of Saxony-Anhalt, has warned that the AfD longs for a “return to the days of the GDR”.

His party says this race is simply “Sven Schulze or the AfD”. CDU MPs in the state contacted by The Telegraph were unavailable for an interview.

Germany is split down the middle over one simple question: are you for the AfD or against it?

To its critics, the AfD is not just another populist party: it is a toxic mix of far-Right extremism and pro-Russian foreign policy that will plunge the country back into the abyss.

The party has been engulfed in a litany of extremism scandals in recent years, such as its presence at a secretive neo-Nazi conference in Potsdam on the forced deportation of foreigners.

Mr Siegmund was among the Potsdam attendees – a revelation that seemed to have had no negative effect on his political career.

Germany’s domestic spy agency, BfV, recently classified the entire AfD party nationwide as a Right-wing extremist group, citing its views on immigrants and pro-Kremlin leanings.

The agency, or Verfassungsschutz, said specifically that the AfD did not consider citizens of a “migration background from predominantly Muslim countries” as equal members of the German people.

The party vehemently denies extremism, is challenging the BfV label in the courts and has pointed out that members of Mr Merz’s CDU party also attended the Potsdam summit.

Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, the AfD joint leaders, said the decision was “clearly politically motivated” and a “severe blow to German democracy”.

To understand how the AfD became a juggernaut of German politics one must go back to 2012, when a group of academics met in the spa town of Bad Nauheim to complain about Angela Merkel.

Under the early moniker Electoral Alternative, a manifesto was pulled together that rejected the then chancellor’s claim that there was “no alternative” to bailing out eurozone countries.

Within three years, however, the party had transformed itself from a donnish Eurosceptic movement to AfD, an aggressive, anti-immigration populist party.

The main trigger was the 2015 refugee crisis, in which Mrs Merkel opened Germany’s borders to a million asylum seekers, mainly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. This was followed by a million Ukrainians after the 2022 invasion.

In liberal western Germany, the party’s anti-migrant rhetoric didn’t have much impact. But in the former Communist east, it was a different story.

According to Dr Kerstin Völkl, a German political scientist at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, the AfD found “fertile ground” in the East because liberal democracy and its party politics were alien concepts.

“In the West, classic party affiliations had been able to grow there for a long time, whether it be workers voting for the Social Democrats or the Christian Democratic Union being anchored in the religious milieu,” she said.

Dr Völkl cited as one example the German People’s Union, a Right-wing nationalist precursor to the AfD that managed to win 16 seats in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament in 1998.

In the 2025 federal election, the AfD had its strongest ever result, gaining 20 per cent of the vote – double its previous performance – and becoming the de facto opposition in Germany.

For now, the party is contained behind a “Brandmauer”, or firewall policy in which Germany’s centrist parties refuse to co-operate with it at the state or federal level.

But securing a majority of seats in the Saxony-Anhalt election this Sunday would allow the AfD to bypass coalition talks – and the firewall – by simply forming its own government.

The man behind the manifesto

The AfD’s campaign in Saxony-Anhalt can be summed up as three simple concepts: deport refugees, make friends with Russia and ban “wokeism”.

The Telegraph interviewed the architect of the manifesto, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the Romanian-born state MP, to understand why closer ties with Moscow were a vote-winner in the heart of the EU.

“We are not for Russia, but are for German interests, and it is in Germany’s interests to import cheap raw materials from Russia,” he said, speaking to The Telegraph in Querfurt, a town of 10,000 residents built around one of the country’s oldest medieval castles.

“For Germany to become strong again, to get back on its feet,” added Mr Tillschneider, “it needs cheap energy. Russia has it to offer… I don’t care who rules in Moscow, they have cheap materials, so we’re buying them.”

Education policy is the other key pillar of the AfD manifesto, in what the party sees as a counter-offensive against “woke” culture, which it says has become deeply embedded in schools.

The AfD says it will separate German children from non-German refugees in Saxony-Anhalt’s classrooms, ban the LGBT rainbow flag and only allow lessons on transgender people to be taught in the science department.

“We can’t expect our children to bear the bad consequences of migration policy. Refugee children bring problems to our classrooms and they are only here for as long as there is war in their home country,” Mr Tillschneider says. “When the war is over, they should go back.”

The party also wants to separate children with learning difficulties or mental disabilities from their classmates, and put them into special-needs classes, to keep lessons running at pace.

‘Life will change’ for migrants and LGBT people

Under Germany’s federal system, the 16 states each set their own education policy, which means the AfD could probably pass such reforms if it ran a regional government.

But Rieke Trimçev, head of political theory at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, said other pledges from the manifesto, such as those on foreign policy, were outside a state government’s purview

Even policies which are within its power, such as segregation in schools, would face significant legal hurdles, she says.

“What is important to stress is that even if the AfD does not succeed, life for under-represented groups – those from a migration background, those with disabilities and queer people – will change,” she says. “Quickly and strongly.”

Back in Jerichow, the sausage fryers are being packed up, the stage is being dismantled and Mr Siegmund is on his way to the next campaign event.

It has been a stimulating afternoon for Mr Kiesewetter, the man who half-jokingly said Ukrainians should thank Putin. But he still has a few reservations about the AfD.

He is not fully convinced that Mr Siegmund will be able to deliver on the AfD’s radical pledges, though he will be voting for him all the same as “something has got to change” in Germany.

He also fears that it may be too late to get back into the good graces of Russia, as things were during the good old GDR.

“The question is whether Russia still wants [economic ties] with us,” he says. “Maybe we have annoyed them so much that they don’t.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/09/03/how-nostalgia-for-russian-rule-could-hand-afd-keys-germany/