AfD election party in Dresden: The cheers are muted

AfD election party in Dresden: The cheers are muted

The AfD gained ground in the state elections in Saxony. But it is unlikely to be enough to participate in government. Impressions from an election party between champagne and seltzer.

Things have already started before the start. “We are here this evening because we all hope that we will experience a miracle,” says Saxony’s AfD top candidate Jörg Urban as he welcomes around 100 guests to the party’s election party. Shortly before the forecasts flash across the screen at 6 p.m., he expresses the hope that the SPD and the Greens will not make it into the state parliament again. Urban receives a lot of applause for both statements in the Dresden Stock Exchange.

But then things get tricky. The AfD has gained ground. However, it is currently just behind the CDU. In any case, it quickly becomes clear that Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) can continue – for example with the BSW and the Social Democrats. From the AfD’s point of view, should we be happy or annoyed about this?

“We are ready to talk,” says federal leader Tino Chrupalla, who comes from Saxony, in a number of interviews he gives on the stock exchange. The AfD’s underlying argument is that together with the CDU, the party has more than 60 percent of the votes in the Free State. If it does not participate in the government, around a third of voters in Saxony will be ignored.

Dippoldiswald state parliament member André Barth summed up the early evening as follows: “This is a good result for the state, but for us it’s neither fish nor fowl.” Dresden AfD politician André Wendt, vice president of the old state parliament, had hoped for more. “I am aware that trees do not grow to the sky,” he says.

At this point, the counting is still ongoing, and the CDU is still narrowly ahead. In many areas, the previous government has “driven the country into the wall.” Wendt says he would have liked the citizens to have put a little more trust in his party so that it could have “crossed the finish line ahead of the CDU.” His conclusion: “I am happy, but not overjoyed.”

Applause for Maximilian Krah at the election party in the Dresden Stock Exchange

Maximilian Krah receives applause. The AfD’s Dresden MEP does not appear until a while after the election party has begun. When he steps onto the terrace of the stock exchange, his party friends there applaud. Krah was not included in the European AfD delegation after allegations of espionage against an employee and comments on the SS, which critics classified as relativizing.

The leading candidate for the European elections appears relaxed. His assessment of the preliminary results is clear. “It is a fantastic result,” says Krah – even if the CDU ends up ahead. Nobody seriously believes that Michael Kretschmer will form a coalition with the AfD. “We remain the dominant force in Saxony and are the main driving force from the opposition,” says Krah. The election result will “certainly not cause the party to be less loud, less direct and less committed.”

The evening is exciting because the gap between the AfD and the CDU is shrinking in the projections. At 8:13 p.m., according to ZDF calculations, the CDU has 31.5 percent of the vote and the AfD 31.4 percent. However, even such a result would not be enough to actually derive the mandate to form a government. And even if the AfD were slightly stronger than the CDU, Kretschmer’s no to the party, which has been classified as right-wing extremist by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Saxony, still applies.

Chrupalla sees the result as a sign of the voters’ desire for a change in politics. If this is to be taken into account, there will be no politics without the AfD. This is likely to lead to further debates about the firewall, including the demarcation of other parties from the AfD.

Series of AfD successes in Saxony

Ultimately, the increased result is not surprising and is part of a series of AfD successes in Saxony. In the 2019 state elections, the party only just fell short of the 30 percent mark. In Pirna, the party has had the mayor since the beginning of the year, who ran as an independent for the AfD. In the local elections in June, the AfD won around 100 more seats than it could have used. It became the strongest force in all district councils and in the Dresden city council. And in the European elections at the same time, the party came first in Saxony, ten percentage points ahead of the CDU.

The AfD relied on this trend and hoped for a boost for the state elections. During the election campaign, Urban avoided any overly harsh tones. “Saxony has woken up,” he said at a rally in Bautzen. The reaction to the deadly knife attack in Solingen was muted. When Urban was asked at a press conference a few days before the election whether this would help the AfD, he replied that he did not want support from it, but wanted a safe country.

The AfD in Brandenburg, where elections are due to take place in three weeks, wants to enforce a ban on asylum seekers and war refugees attending public events in the state parliament. The Saxony AfD did not say anything like that. Urban left the shrill tones to Alice Weidel. In Dresden, the federal leader, who forms a dual leadership with Chrupalla, spoke a few days before the election of a “gang of thugs from the national popular front – from all the other parties”.

During the election campaign, Urban presented himself as a conservative who could be an alliance partner for the CDU. He criticizes deficits in the education sector and also in Saxony’s migration policy. But the AfD also formulated proposals that are compatible with those of the CDU. A few days before the election, AfD MP Romy Penz brought up the idea of ​​increasing the number of hours worked by part-time teachers with civil service contracts.

Kretschmer had also previously pointed out that the lack of school hours in the Free State was also exacerbated by the right to work part-time. This has presumably benefited from her party’s criticism of arms deliveries to Ukraine and the sharply expressed displeasure with the Berlin traffic light coalition. “We want to take on government responsibility,” said Chrupalla at an election campaign rally in Bautzen. This is unlikely to happen in Saxony.