Germany’s Far Right Sees Its Opening (Again)

Foreign Policy: “In the decade since the party first entered the German political scene, it has won seats in the Bundestag and in state-level parliaments across the country—but, in large part due to long-standing taboos against collaborating with the far right, it had never won any executive governing positions. Although there had been a number of close calls in AfD strongholds at the local and regional levels, particularly in eastern Germany, where the party does best, AfD candidates always fell short of a majority in runoff votes against other parties.”

“But that changed with a pair of back-to-back local-level elections in recent weeks: On Sunday, the town of Raguhn-Jessnitz in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt elected Germany’s first-ever AfD full-time mayor. Hannes Loth, a 42-year-old lawmaker, defeated an independent candidate backed by other parties with 51 percent of the vote. Just a week earlier in Sonneberg, a small district in the nearby state of Thuringia, AfD candidate Robert Sesselmann became the first candidate from the far-right party to win a district administrator’s post, taking almost 53 percent of the vote against a candidate from the conservative Christian Democratic Union.”