Europe’s political shift to the Right is coming into sharp focus in the medieval German city of Magdeburg, where a nationalist party is expected today to take power in a German state for the first time since the defeat of Nazism and Adolf Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker.
A map of the continent’s changing political landscape shows that, 81 years later, more than half of the European Union’s 27 member states — stretching from Italy to Finland — are now governed or significantly shaped by Right-wing parties and factions that challenge the case for uncontrolled mass immigration.
That challenge to Brussels’ multicultural vision is especially visible in Magdeburg, the former East German communist capital of Saxony-Anhalt, where the results of a potentially historic state parliament election are expected tonight.
The final opinion polls put the controversial Alternative for Germany (AFD) far ahead on 41 per cent, just 13 years after the party first appeared on the political margins as an anti-immigration movement.
Der Spiegel, the centre-Left German magazine, has questioned whether the party’s state leader, the charismatic Ulrich Siegmund, may be “the most dangerous man in Germany?”
Yet the party’s popularity has been on the rise, say academics, since former Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors – and effectively those of the EU – to 1.3 million migrants in 2015, many of them fleeing war in Syria.
As leader of the centrist Christian Democratic Union (CDU) government at the time, she declared ‘We can do it’, confidently insisting that the country could handle the relentless swathes of newcomers.
Today the CDU faces a voters’ backlash across Germany.
A graphic displaying the fast-changing political landscape across Europe
A far-right group of approximately 800 people hold a demonstration marching from the Ostkreuz Train Station towards Berlin
British historian Timothy Garton Ash has said: ‘The dramatic influx of refugees is the single most direct cause of the AFD’s electoral success.’
Professor Andreas Rodder, contemporary history expert at Germany’s Mainz University, predicts an attempted ‘firewall’ – whereby all mainstream parties, particularly the CDU, resolve not to co-operate, form coalitions or govern with the AFD – will fail to stop the party taking power.
In and around Magdeburg, tens of thousands of excited AFD supporters were staging rallies this weekend before heading for voting stations.
Already the party is the main opposition, holding 152 seats out of 630 in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament – with numerous polls showing it would win outright power if a national election was held today.
And while this country, and many others in Europe, have been plagued by migrant crime or terror atrocities, voters here in Magdeburg have their own particular tragic memories.
In 2016 I first visited the city to report on the story of a 19-year-old university student who was gang-raped by three Afghan men from a refugees’ housing block. Having ambushed her, they dragged her into nearby bushes.
In 2024, a BMW 4×4 was driven through the city’s Christmas market, ramming 309 people and killing six, including a nine-year-old boy, in what police described as a ‘rampage’ by a 50-year-old Saudi-born psychiatrist and refugee who was later jailed for life.
None of this is forgotten (or indeed forgiven), particularly by young Germans enticed by the AFD’s slick social media messages warning of the dangers of mass immigration, and promising that migrants who enter the country illegally will be sent home.
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Participants hold placards in front of the Magdeburg Cathedral during a rally on September 5
The former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pictured in Lisbon, Portugal on July 9
For teenagers and those in their 20s, the hideous evils of the Third Reich were committed long ago, and they feel it is now their own futures that are at stake. One rallying slogan – ‘More Bismarck, less Hitler’ – has caught their eye.
It is a message that insists the school history curriculum should emphasise less the horrific atrocities of the Nazi period and more Germany’s triumphant past, not least the 19th century rule of Otto von Bismarck.
The so-called Iron Chancellor unified the country, began its empire and introduced old-age pensions and health insurance to undercut socialism’s appeal.
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At an evening rally in Haldensleben, a village near Magdeburg, I spoke to teenagers preparing to vote.
An 18-year-old factory worker, Elias Megankoth, who was waving an AFD poster, told me: ‘Migrant criminals should be put in jail or leave the country.’
Another youngster, just 16, added: ‘We are Generation Germany and we support remigration to send home foreigners who break our laws.’
Meanwhile, Max Reinecke, 17, said he had been to ten rallies of different political parties but had decided that when he is old enough to vote at 18 it will be for AFD.
‘We are living through the consequences of migrants in our classrooms, on our streets,’ he said. ‘It is time for our voice to be heard. We are the future.’
A few streets away I met migrants who now fear a reckoning. Babe Fall, 31, is from Mali, a country rocked by Islamic insurgency, and stopped his bicycle to talk to me.
He said he works as a delivery driver and is frightened: ‘I think I will experience aggression against me if the AFD win.’
Migrant camps have sprung up on Trampoline Beach in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta
Local people protest against the influx of migrants from neighbouring Morocco in July
At the high street barber’s shop I met Kamir Hashemi, 31, who came to Germany in 2016 with a huge family contingent of five brothers, his parents and his wife.
‘I like Frau Merkel,’ he said with a grin. ‘I could never go back to Afghanistan where my two daughters would wear a face covering and be barred from school. The German people are respectful to us, but I expect an AFD victory will change that.’
His words were echoed by another barber, a Syrian Kurd aged 31 who refused to give me his name.
He said that in his salon, near Kamir’s own, there was ‘real fear’ among his Iranian and Iraqi customers. ‘They are scared they will be made to leave Germany with their families immediately if the AFD wins.’
The Saxony-Anhalt election is a microcosm of rising migrant scepticism across the EU.
Over the border in France, National Rally’s Marine Le Pen leads polls ahead of the presidential election next year, with a promise to hold a referendum on whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear the hijab.
Support for Right-wing populist parties in Poland, Portugal, Croatia and elsewhere is soaring, but resistance to illegal immigration is nowhere more virulent than in Spain.
A border invasion of Ceuta, Spain’s North African enclave, by tens of thousands of Moroccans and sub-Saharans in July, has hardened hearts.
No fewer than 22 EU member states have criticised Madrid’s ultra-Left government for threatening the security of the entire bloc as result of its failure to halt mass immigration.
As the problems in Ceuta escalate – with new reports of migrants running amok and committing rapes of fellow migrants, including four children – Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is under enormous pressure to resign.
Mass protests have been held across the country and Right-wing parties are capitalising.
A snap poll reveals that if an election was held this weekend, Sanchez’s ruling Socialist Workers’ Party would be trounced by a coalition of the Conservative
People’s Party and the hard-Right Vox Party, which together would have an absolute majority in the Madrid parliament.
What would follow is an amendment of the constitution to allow tougher rules on borders and immigration. The prevailing mood in Europe is unmistakable.
As our map shows, the political landscape is changing fast, in a revolution just as seismic as 11 years ago, when Germany, attempting to atone for its Nazi history, welcomed with bunting and balloons any stranger who knocked on the door.
