The AfD loses the runoff election for the mayor’s post in Nordhausen against a non-party democrat. That’s nice, but there’s no reason to be euphoric, because local elections are coming soon.
There is still good news. A democrat has surprisingly won a mayoral election in Thuringia with great support from civil society. And if that is the good news, then that says a lot a year before the state elections. Nordhausen came close to being ruled by an AfD historical revisionist who trivialized the crimes of the National Socialists. In the city of 42,000 people, everyone can still see for themselves the horrors of that time. The SS deported 60,000 people to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in the city; a third did not survive forced labor, hunger and torture. When US soldiers liberated the camp in 1945, they found mountains of corpses.