Nordhausen: Another AfD mayor in Germany?

Perhaps many in Nordhausen are thinking the same way as the young mother who has decided to vote for the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) for the first time. 

Something has to change, because after all, she has to think about her children's future, she says. She hears more languages at her children's school than she did on vacation in Sweden. And anyway, Nordhausen finally needs a strong personality who can represent the city properly. At the end of the brief interview, without really expecting an answer, she asks, "So? Do I have a Nazi stamp now?" 

Nordhausen, a city of around 42,000 in eastern Germany, is currently more famous for its schnapps distillery and grain, but by the end of the weekend, the entire city is in danger of getting the "Nazi stamp." On September 10, the small city in the state of Thuringia, which for 15 years has been named a "Place of Diversity" by the German government, will elect a new mayor, and the AfD candidate Jörg Prophet is currently ahead in the polls. 

This would be the AfD's third local election victory in eastern Germany in the past few months, having won the district council race in Sonneberg, also in Thuringia, and the mayoral election in Raguhn-Jessnitz in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

But both of those towns have only a few thousand inhabitants. Nordhausen would represent a major coup for a party whose Thuringian branch is considered, by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution — the German intelligence that tracks political extremists — as a danger to Germany's democratic order. 

Desperate fight against stigmatization 

Nordhausen's current interim mayor is Alexandra Rieger of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), and she is deploying all her resources to prevent an AfD victory.

"This city doesn't deserve that," she told DW, sitting in her constituency office. "We would be stigmatized in Germany. I'm fighting to ensure that we remain a diverse Nordhausen." 

Rieger is also the only woman among the main candidates, who represent the main German parties: the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Greens, the Free Democrats (FDP), and the AfD. But the larger issue that affects federal politics in Berlin also applies to Nordhausen: Political wrangling among the mainstream parties plays into the AfD's hands. 

"Voting far-right would have been unthinkable here a few years ago and would have been kept to oneself, but now it's a trend," said Rieger. "Unfortunately, we're moving from one crisis to the next, and that's just scaring people more and more. The potential for frustration is high." 

More attacks on the Greens 

Wilma Busch, who sits on the city council for the Green Party, knows a thing or two about frustration. Her position and political affiliation mean that she's often confronted with anger, even hatred, in Nordhausen. The federal government's much-discussed "heating law" — aimed at reducing carbon emissions by renovating heating systems — has not been much help for her campaign. Canvassing for votes on the street has occasionally become, she says, like running the gauntlet. 

"The police often have to patrol our campaign stand, people yell at us from passing cars, it's not without its problems," she told DW. "The windows of our constituency office are regularly spat at and graffitied. Five or six years ago, that didn't happen, but now it's part of everyday life." 

This is all the more surprising because Nordhausen is in fact one of Germany's pioneering cities on climate protection. It was among the first cities to establish an integrated climate concept up to 2050, and the council even employs a climate protection official. At the penultimate city council meeting, the AfD spoke out against this, saying there was no need for such a post, recalled Busch, who has become pessimistic about the future. 

"If the AfD wins the mayoral election, that would be the third 'worst case scenario' here in the east. I hope that we can prevent this," she said. "But this development will certainly take hold in eastern Germany, let's not kid ourselves. It's scary because the people who vote for him are also voting, to some extent, for Höcke." 

The notorious Thuringia AfD 

Björn Höcke, the AfD parliamentary group leader in Thuringia, is not only the AfD's figurehead in eastern Germany but also one of the party's most influential politicians. He is one of Germany's most notorious extremists, and in 2019 a German court ruled that it was not defamatory to call him a fascist. 

The AfD's mayoral candidate Prophet appears not to mind the far-right association. He has not distanced himself from Höcke, and was a guest speaker at the summer party of the far-right "Compact" magazine, rubbing shoulders with several right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis. 

Migration is his key issue, something that causes problems for the Nordhausen refugee support association Schrankenlos (literally, "Boundless"), for whom hostility has already become part of everyday life.

"Racist slogans get chanted, swastikas get smeared on the walls of our residential building or café," Schrankenlos Managing Director Stephanie Tiepelmann-Halm told DW. "The sad culmination was when dead pigeons with their heads cut off were left lying in front of entrance doors, and even pigs' heads thrown onto balconies." 

The proportion of foreigners living in Nordhausen is 7.3%, only about half the national average. A total of 2,500 refugees live in the Nordhausen area, 1,900 of whom are from Ukraine. For many, Schrankenlos and its affiliated store is the first point of contact. As well as counseling, the association provides women's cafés and language courses, where 28-year-old Zaki Hussaini learned his almost perfect German.

An environmental engineer from Kabul, Afghanistan, Hussaini actually speaks highly of his new home in Nordhausen and would like to stay. But such stories could soon be a thing of the past; Tiepelmann-Halm believes Schrankenlos' existence would be threatened by an AfD mayor. 

The election has also long been an issue for the foreign students, many from India, Pakistan, Egypt and Nigeria, who study at Nordhausen University. According to the university president, Jörg Wagner, new applicants are worried about the AfD. 

Tiepelmann-Halm misses what she calls any kind of clear stance from people in politics and society against the shift to the right.

"In discussions, people often refer to political neutrality, but this isn't politically neutral," she said. "We all have to abide by statutes that talk about cosmopolitanism, tolerance and diversity. It makes me angry to hear that we're not allowed to take a position. I don't understand that." 

AfD versus remembrance 

Just five kilometers north of Nordhausen, on a road named for the victims of fascism, stands a rusted, Nazi-era railroad car, a memorial to people deported to concentration camps. Nearby is what was once the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, now also a memorial. A subcamp of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp, Mittelbau-Dora was where 60,000 prisoners from 48 nations were forced to build weapons for Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. One in three prisoners died due to the inhumane conditions. 

Standing in front of rebuilt barracks, Anett Dremel, director of the Mittelbau-Dora memorial, repeats what many people are currently asking her: How can it be that an AfD mayor could soon be in office in the immediate vicinity of a former concentration camp?

"I just got an email from a US relative asking me to keep her updated about the election," she said. "There is a lot of unease among survivors and relatives. People, of course, are seeing the billboards around town and asking what it means." 

Some 2,600 victims of National Socialism are buried in 16 mass graves in Nordhausen's main cemetery. The cemetery is currently more like a park where children play, dogs are walked, and mountain bikers do their laps. Some €900,000 ($970,000) has been budgeted for a redesign of the cemetery to commemorate those victims, just under half of which is to come from the state of Thuringia — but the AfD considers this irresponsible in view of Nordhausen's "disastrous financial situation." 

"The AfD says it would be enough to put a bench under a tree with a noticeboard to make a place of reflection," said Dremel. "But it's a place that expresses deep suffering, people who were abducted, who were exploited for labor, who died, and you have to inform people about that. It's a memorial site, but it also needs to be an information site." 

A school class has just visited the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp memorial site again and is getting ready for the 90-minute tour of the former camp grounds. Around 60,000 people visit here every year, from France, Australia, the US and other countries. 

Anett Dremel believes that the memorial's cooperation with the city, with events, lectures and readings, would be under threat if the AfD came to power.

"We are looking with great concern at the election on September 10. This normalization and the strengthening of the AfD shakes the values for which we as a memorial stand," she said. "Diversity against racism and against antisemitism — we see these foundations threatened." 

Longing for a strong man 

If none of the candidates achieves an absolute majority on Sunday, a runoff election on September 24 will decide who becomes the new mayor. The AfD's Prophet is already considered a shoo-in for a runoff, and it is not yet clear whether the other parties will rally behind one candidate to prevent an AfD victory — as just happened in Seelow in Brandenburg, when a broad alliance that included the conservative CDU and more left-wing parties joined forces. 

But such anti-AfD alliances are becoming increasingly difficult, especially in eastern Germany, and that is no coincidence, says Nordhausen historian Thomas Müller. 

"There is a basic mood here, as elsewhere in eastern Germany, that people are very dissatisfied and would like a strong party and a strong person to bring order back to this supposedly chaotic situation," he told DW. "On the other hand, we have to accept the truth that many people also stand behind the AfD's policies. We thought for many years that maybe these are fellow travelers or protest voters. No, unfortunately they are people who think exactly what the AfD thinks." 

What really concerns Müller, he says, is the lack of empathy among many people in Nordhausen for Ukrainians who have fled the Russian invasion, and the silence of civil society. His explanation for the AfD's strength: Many people in Nordhausen have a sense of déjà vu, thinking back to the time of the fall of communism, when the socialist GDR ceased to exist. 

At that time, almost all the major companies in the city were forced to shut down, and people were left on the street from one day to the next. Now, 30 years later, there is again a feeling that everything is getting worse, and too few people understand the consequences of an AfD mayor in Nordhausen. 

"We certainly won't be welcomed by our twin town of Bet Shemesh in Israel anymore," Müller predicts. "Nor will we be welcomed by concentration camp survivors. An AfD mayor would certainly also lead to a collapse in our tourism from guests from northern and western Germany." 

This article was originally written in German.

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