Germany’s far right extremist Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD) made some serious gains in Sunday’s state elections, placing first in the eastern state of Thuringia with a third of the vote and grabbing a close second in neighboring Saxony, the BBC reports on the first state parliamentary win for a nationalist party in Germany since World War II. The victory in Thuringia is mostly symbolic however, as the other parties are very unlikely to want to work with the AfD and will form a coalition to shut them out of governance in the state. Obviously they can forget about it in Saxony too.
Still, the gains in the poorer, formerly communist east were a foreboding sign of AfD’s momentum going in the wrong direction for a country that prides itself on being a modern, plural democracy it infamously was not eight decades ago. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation,” Chancellor Olaf Schultz said.