Thousands of far-left Antifa activists took to the streets of the German city of Halle on Saturday ahead of an expected historic victory for the anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany party in a state election.
Panic appears to be setting in as voters head to the polls on Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt amid the prospect of the AfD taking control of a state government for the first time in the populist-nationalist party’s 13-year history.
According to Tagesschau, some 26 protests were registered to be held across the state over the weekend. This included some 2,500 who joined an Antifa rally in the city of Halle on Saturday evening, local police said.
Participants of the “Stay anti-fascist!” demonstration were seen wearing black bloc clothing with masks, while carrying the Antifa and LGBT flags. Others were seen carrying placards reading “FCK NZS” and “FCK AFD”.
A further 15,000 people were estimated to have joined a so-called pro-democracy festival in the state capital of Magdeburg on Saturday, organised by the “Saxony-Anhalt Open to the World” alliance.
However, it is unclear exactly how organic such demonstrations were, with MDR reporting that, rather than being a purely local outpouring, demonstrators came from cities across Germany, including Leipzig, Dresden, Jena, and Berlin.
The leftist protests come as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is set for one of its most significant victories since its formation in 2013. Polling ahead of Sunday’s vote in Saxony-Anhalt projected the party to win between 41 and 43 per cent of the vote.
This would put the party on the precipice of forming a government outright for the first time in its history.
Much will depend on the performance of smaller parties with no prospect of winning the election; however, the proportion of seats allocated will be heavily influenced by the number of parties that secure the five per cent threshold for representation in the state parliament.
Indeed, should the left-wing Social Democrats (SDP) and the far-left Greens clear the threshold, it would likely enable the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz to form a minority government, despite being projected to win only around 20 per cent of the vote on Sunday.
So intent are the supposedly conservative CDU on not working with the AfD that they would likely need to form a government with either the informal support or at least the abstention of Die Linke (The Left), the direct descendant of the governing communist government of East Germany during Soviet control.