Dear Reader,
Four hours after the first results came in from the state election in Saxony-Anhalt, a lot is still up in the air.
What is clear is that the AfD has scored a victory that goes even beyond what the polls suggested it would achieve. The first exit polls are putting it at over 44 per cent. The populist party’s candidate for state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, ran, by all accounts, a very impressive campaign.
Even the broadsheet media, which are almost universally hostile to his party, concede that Siegmund is a talented campaigner who managed to draw huge crowds to his soapbox-style campaign.
One analyst I spoke to last week said that Siegmund is the first AfD politician whose central message is a positive or optimistic one. Driving around on a GDR moped and talking about bringing back “the good old times”, he managed to create a sense that Saxony-Anhalt was at the avant-garde of a new counter-revolution in German democracy that would sweep away the old elite and bring about a conservative revival.
It looks, however, as though the AfD has just missed out on an overall majority.