ERFURT, Germany — Germany’s far-right AfD scores strong gains in the ex-Communist eastern state of Thuringia, home to one of its most radical figures, beating mainstream parties such as Angela Merkel’s centre-right CDU, early exit polls show.
While popular premier Bodo Ramelow’s far-left Die Linke party easily wins with about 30 percent, the Alternative for Germany scored at least 23%, according to public broadcasters ARD and ZDF, more than doubling its result in the previous election in 2014.
This put the anti-immigration party in second place, narrowly ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, who win about 22%, and far ahead of her coalition partners, the once powerful Social Democrats (SPD), who score only 8%.
Far-right AfD party supporters react to the first forecasts of the results of the state elections in Thuringia in Erfurt, eastern Germany, on October 27, 2019. (Jens Büttner/dpa/AFP)
The AfD’s strong result comes despite widespread criticism after an October 9 attack in the eastern city of Halle, where a suspected neo-Nazi gunman tried and failed to storm a synagogue then shot dead two people outside.
After the bloody attack, the commissioner for combating anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, like many other critics, argued that the AfD had trafficked in incendiary anti-Jewish sentiment.
The Thuringia campaign has been marked by anger, threats and recriminations, with CDU candidate Mike Mohring labeling the AfD’s local leader, the nationalist hardliner Bjoern Hoecke, a “Nazi.”
A triumphant Hoecke tells supporters today that the state, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, had voted for a second revolution, a “Transition 2.0,” and delivered “a clear ‘no’ to the ossified party landscape.”
— AFP
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