The Alternative for Germany (AfD) could bring sweeping changes if it were to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt. The far-right party, which is currently well ahead in opinion polls, is hoping to form a single-party government and see its lead candidate, Ulrich Siegmund, become state premier.
The Saxony-Anhalt branch of the AfD is classified by the domestic intelligence agency as “confirmed far-right.”
Radical tightening of asylum laws
In its draft government programme, the AfD has promised “deportation from minute one!” if it wins the election in Saxony-Anhalt. According to the party’s election programme, the aim is simply to deport as many immigrants without residency permits as possible.
The party has also pledged much stricter asylum rules at every level: it wants more detention pending deportation, compulsory work for asylum-seekers, and plans to cut all state funding for integration programmes, which it calls an “asylum industry.”
Furthermore, it wants to exclude children and adolescents without permanent residency in Germany from regular schools. It also plans to establish a “Remigration” Task Force within the state government to coordinate asylum policy.
Exactly how many of these measures an AfD state government would be legally able to implement remains unclear. Creating special classes for refugees could, for example, breach international and European law.
And the question of who can and cannot be deported falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government, not an individual state.
Anti-immigration policy
The AfD opposes immigration to Germany. In its government platform, the party calls for a “180-degree turnaround in migration policy,” and says its aim is to reduce the number of immigrants in Saxony-Anhalt.
However, the region has been suffering for years from a shortage of skilled workers, particularly in nursing and elderly care. The AfD’s plan to address this shortage is to encourage Germans living abroad to return.
To this end, it plans to launch a “return programme,” including a proposed “return bonus” to help find housing and childcare places. It is unclear how many returnees the AfD expects and how much money it has budgeted for the “return programme.”
Saxony-Anhalt has been severely affected by depopulation for more than 30 years. No other German state has seen its population shrink more since reunification in 1990 — from around 2.9 million people then to 2.1 million today.
Economic researchers such as Reint Gropp, president of the Halle Institute for Economic Research, have warned that an AfD government is likely to worsen the skilled worker shortage.
“Highly qualified professionals, in particular, have options,” he told Die Welt newspaper on Tuesday. “If they feel they are unwelcome or can expect hostility, they will choose other regions.”
Rapprochement with Russia
The 16 state governments have virtually no authority over Germany‘s foreign and defence policy, though they can influence political debates through the Bundesrat, the chamber of parliament that represents the states. In that context, an AfD state premier would carry considerable political weight.
For example, since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, Germany has largely halted oil imports, but the AfD’s election platform calls for a rapprochement with Russia and an end to sanctions.
The call is largely symbolic, as Saxony-Anhalt is bound by federal sanctions, but an AfD state premier could set a new tone in the Bundesrat.
The AfD also wants to expand Russian language teaching in schools and specifically recruit native Russian speakers for this purpose.
On Ukraine, meanwhile, the AfD is taking a harder line, calling for a “return offensive” for Ukrainian refugees. Again, a state government cannot deport Ukrainians from Germany — that is regulated by EU federal policy.
Establishing citizen patrols
Particularly controversial is the AfD’s call for a kind of auxiliary police force. The regular police are “overwhelmed” by the task of ensuring security, according to the AfD’s programme for Saxony-Anhalt: “We will therefore establish a voluntary citizen patrol as a third pillar of the local security architecture.”
Legal scholar and criminologist Thomas Feltes, of Ruhr University Bochum, warns against the idea. “It is the police’s duty to ward off dangers and ensure the protection of the public. Only the police are authorized to use force in doing so,” he wrote in a column for the outlet Legal Tribune Online.
A “citizen patrol,” he said, would basically be a vigilante group that would have a negative effect on public safety: “Where such groups are active, the fear of crime is only stoked — not only among the participants, but above all among everyone else, and not just among ‘concerned’ citizens,” he wrote.
Radical change in social policy
A central tenet of the AfD’s governing platform is so-called identity politics. It aims to promote a positive image of German history, and advocates a fundamentally different view of the country’s past. The party describes the process of coming to terms with German crimes during the Nazi era as the “perpetuation of a guilt complex” and wants to change school curricula accordingly.
It has also declared war on social diversity: rainbow flags, as symbols of diversity, are to be banned in schools. It rejects the world-famous Bauhaus architecture — which flourished in Saxony-Anhalt — as “too globalist” and calls for a “patriotic cultural policy.”
To that end, it wants to redirect funding away from the many pro-democracy projects that receive state support for their work. In its platform, the AfD has rejected any continuation of these payments.