analysis
The mayoral election in Nordhausen was supposed to be the AfD’s next big triumph. Things turned out differently. There are many lessons in the election result – both for the extreme right-wing party and for the others.
The word for Sunday was “surprising.” Surprisingly, many journalists agreed, the AfD lost the runoff election in Nordhausen in Thuringia. In the end, candidate Jörg Prophet was almost ten percentage points behind the old and new mayor Kai Buchmann.
The starting position seemed favorable. In the first round of voting, Prophet was well ahead of the independent Buchmann with 42.1 percent of the vote. It came to 23.7 percent – and subsequently only received partial support from parties. It was not only in the AfD that people expected that Nordhausen would have its third major success in a local election.
There is no march through
Previously, the breakthrough that some people had hoped for after the successful district election in Sonneberg had not materialized. Even before Nordhausen, promising candidates failed in half a dozen cities and communities in eastern Germany. This is probably why Nordhausen was heated up as a “choice of direction”, now the AfD only speaks of a “respectable success”.
It is a small dampener in the mood for the AfD, which experienced a summer high with its victories in Sonneberg and also in the mayoral election in Raguhn-Jeßnitz. Officials report a rush of new members. More and more of the long-time residents are now gaining the courage to run for office. The AfD, which has so far had problems filling all the mandates it has won in local councils in East Germany, is now spreading across the country.
Candidates decisive
But the details show that it is not enough, as an ex-AfD man scoffed years ago, to “paint a broomstick blue” and put it up. At least not when it comes to an office. Robert Sesselmann in Sonneberg, Hannes Loth in Raguhn-Jeßnitz and Jörg Prophet in Nordhausen have already been active in local politics for a long time. Their campaigns were – unlike those of some party colleagues – well prepared. They also refrained from directly attacking their competitors.
Nordhausen is now showing once again that the AfD can mobilize more strongly than in the past. Prophet received around 1,000 more votes than in the first round.
The party gathers convinced and dissatisfied people. And the discontent among some parts of the population is immense. Issues such as support for Ukraine, the heating law and asylum policy continue to radiate far into the local level and inspire the AfD. It may have helped the re-elected Mayor Buchmann not to have a party register.
Good starting point for AfD
The dispute with the AfD over offices is bringing local politics in the east back into the focus of the population. While in Mannheim in Baden-Württemberg a mayoral election was just decided with barely more than 30 percent voter turnout, in Nordhausen it was just under 60 percent.
The ground is fertile for the AfD where local politics has stalled. In Sonneberg, the district administrator’s chair was de facto orphaned for two years after the incumbent became seriously ill. The medical officer finally had to determine that he was unfit for work. It was similar in Raguhn-Jeßnitz. In Nordhausen, on the other hand, the non-party Buchmann was considered popular, but in his first term in office he fell out with much of the local politics.
AfD positions disclosed
In Nordhausen it also became clearer what the AfD and its candidate stand for. Representatives of civil society such as the foundation director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner, publicly opposed the party. The former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp is located in Nordhausen’s urban area. Wagner repeatedly pointed out that Prophet had spoken of a “cult of guilt” among Germans and that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution would be keeping an eye on him from 2021 at the latest because of his statements. On the Saturday before the runoff election, the “Nordhausen Together” initiative held a rally on the town hall square.
Prophet, in turn, held a rally at the same location a week earlier with the AfD federal leader Tino Chrupalla and the top candidate for the European elections, Maximilian Krah, at which Krah tried to exploit the bombing of Nordhausen in the Second World War.
Even before the first round of voting, Prophet had attended an event organized by the right-wing extremist “Compact” magazine. This is probably one of the reasons why the AfD’s progressive normalization reached an electoral limit.
The CDU and others held back
That made the other parties happy. Thuringia’s CDU state leader Mario Voigt commented on the election results on Sunday: “The north of Thuringia remains stable.” The CDU had refrained from recommending an election for both Buchmann and Prophet. The local business association and the cathedral community behaved similarly.
The CDU is certain that their CDU candidate lost in Sonneberg because he was supported by all other parties against the AfD. There was no such “united front,” as the AfD calls it, this time. Buchmann himself is also said to have preferred smaller networks and personal supporters.
Media interest in the election was unbroken, but less emotionally charged. To this day, Sonneberg is supported by the television images of some ice cream parlor visitors who publicly uttered Nazi slogans into the camera a few days before the election. There were no such recordings from Nordhausen.
Pay attention to Bitterfeld-Wolfen
A city from which there have been many reports in recent years is Bitterfeld-Wolfen in Saxony-Anhalt. The mayor was also elected in the AfD stronghold on Sunday. Candidate Henning Dornack won 33.7 percent of the vote for his party. Incumbent Armin Schenk from the CDU got 29.1 percent. Both will now run for the runoff election in two weeks. Based on the experience of the past few months, the advantage is unlikely to lie with the AfD.