Ten years after its creation, the far-right German party AfD scored a major success on Sunday by winning an election in a district for the first time (Landkreis) in Thuringia. The movement’s candidate won nearly 53% of the vote against his Christian Democrat competitor supported by all the other parties.
With our correspondent in Berlin, Pascal Thibault
” It was just the beginning “: the president of the AfD Tino Chrupalla was pleased with the success of his candidate in the district of Sonneberg. Björn Höcke, the boss of the party in Thuringia, put under surveillance by general intelligence like the whole movement in this Land, already evokes a ” earthquake for the three regional elections in the East next year.
For the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, the extreme right will lead a Landkreis (district).
first party
In the polls, the AfD is the leading party today in this part of Germany. This first success in a local election is initially symbolic in Germany’s second smallest district. Created ten years ago, the far-right movement has won victories with greater weight since it is present in all German regional diets, in the Bundestag and in the European Parliament.
But this local victory that the party was able to stage successfully constitutes an electric shock while the AfD reaches historically high scores in the polls at nearly 20%. ” Alarm signal », « black day for democracy are words that often come up in the many reactions. German Jewish community president Josef Schuster felt that “ Not every AfD voter is an extremist, but both the party and its candidate clearly are “.
Read alsoGermany: far-right AfD party at the same level as Olaf Scholz’s SPD in the polls