The polls were already warning about it and yesterday the results confirmed it resoundingly. The far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has swept the elections in Saxony-Anhalt and could end up governing if it finally achieves an absolute majority in seats – at the last minute it was hovering at 45.5% of the votes with 85% counted – or if its potential partner, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) party, which for the moment exceeds the 5% threshold of votes that allows for representation in the regional Parliament, supports it or abstains in the vote. Be that as it may, what is clear is that an overwhelming majority of citizens of this federal state, one of the 16 into which Germany is divided and which has a population that barely exceeds two million people, has voted for it. In fact, the first thing that has been surprising today is the spectacular increase in turnout, which with 78% has surpassed by 18 points that which occurred in the previous elections of 2021.
The success of the AfD is very bad news because it is a party that openly has ties to neo-Nazis, some of whom are part of the country's structure; it carries slogans such as "remigration" with the objective of expelling or, if that is not possible, isolating and labeling immigrants, and it defends a social and cultural model centered on the traditional and conservative family that it plans to promote with campaigns in the educational and cultural sphere. For example, by banning the rainbow flag in schools. It is also considered a "friendly" party to Russia, which in the current moment of hybrid war is a real problem for the federal government; it opposes the war in Ukraine and economic support for Kyiv, and economically it defends the fiscal discipline that entails keeping the country's debt in check even if this means cuts to necessary public services and investments.
All of this constitutes policies that attack many of the values of the European Union itself, and which make it difficult to face current threats to Europe with unity, both in the East, with a Vladimir Putin who must be rubbing his hands together today, and in the West, with Donald Trump also pleased by the advance of an ideology that is very much in line with his own. For this very reason, and although we are talking about a small state, the spectacular result achieved by Ulrich Siegmund, the young AfD candidate, is concerning due to the potential it has to be replicated in the elections scheduled in other states.
The truth is that the far right is gaining positions without pause throughout Europe. In Italy, it governs; in France, only the cordon sanitaire prevents it from having more institutional presence, but it is clearly also leading the polls; in Germany, in fact, it was already the second force in the federal elections with 20% of the vote; in Sweden, next week, the Sweden Democrats could have enough votes to enter the right-wing coalition government, and in Spain, it has also achieved power in almost all the autonomous regions where the PP governs, and everyone takes it for granted that it will also be in government if Feijóo has the option to govern. The cordons sanitaires, as may happen in Germany, are breaking down. And the flood could wash away many of the best advancements that humanity has had in the last century.
