AfD Saxony-Anhalt is a racist extremist group, according to the German state's intelligence agency. The party may well trounce its rivals in this weekend's state election.
Page B1From§Eachthe milkman edition — 6 September 2026
THE FIREWALL
German intelligence calls AfD extremist; Saxony-Anhalt is set to hand it an outright majority
As it ran on the front
The firewall against the far right died this weekend in Saxony-Anhalt, survived by hope, preceded in death by two years of polling that said this was coming. It was born in 1949, out of the wreckage the country had just finished making, on the theory that a mainstream willing to hold hands across the aisle could keep the fringe fenced out of power. It was not built to win arguments. It was built to hold a line, and lines hold only as long as somebody keeps a hand on them.
The first hand came off in September 2024, in Thuringia, when the Alternative for Germany finished first in a state election for the first time since the Second World War. Next door in Saxony that same weekend the party did not repeat the milestone — it posted the kind of gains the wire called "large," the sort of showing that used to earn the word wave before this desk ran out of milder ones for it. Two states, one signal, and the fence already had a gap.…
…(cont) By this month the polling had stopped being a warning and started being a schedule. A dispatch dated September 2 called Saxony-Anhalt's vote a test of the firewall itself — not of a candidate, not of a coalition, of the wall. The state's own intelligence service, the agency whose job is watching extremism rather than inventing it, classifies the local Alternative for Germany a racist extremist group, a finding the wire reports as settled business, not breaking news. Settled or not, it did not stop Sunday's ballots from being printed, distributed, or favored to produce, in one paper's own phrasing, the first far-right state government since the Nazi era.
The man positioned to inherit it is Ulrich Siegmund, 35, who sold air fresheners before he sold this. There is a particular penny-ante malarkey to a man who moves from car interiors to state interiors without changing the pitch, and the polling has been too busy confirming the trend to notice the punch line sitting right inside it.
The firewall leaves no widow, no children, only a cabinet of memos still addressed to whoever was supposed to act on them. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners find the next ballot with a gap still in the fence, and go stand in it.
“They spent two years calling this poll noise, then the noise turned into a government. The state's own intelligence service says extremist, in writing, and the ballots got printed and handed out anyway. The guy on the cusp of running the place used to sell air fresheners out of a car — same pitch, bigger car, and this time the fine print is a state.”
“A state intelligence label isn't a conviction, it's just some analysts' opinion on a party voters are perfectly free to elect anyway. Siegmund sold air fresheners before politics — so what, plenty of people start somewhere, that's not disqualifying, that's a résumé. Voters choosing the one party their own government's watchdog calls extremist is democracy working exactly as — did I say "exactly as"? That's not what I meant to say.”
The receipts
Elections in Saxony-Anhalt, in the country’s east, could result in an outright majority for the Alternative for Germany party.
Ulrich Siegmund, 35, once sold air fresheners. Now his far-right party is the favorite to win a state election in eastern Germany on Sunday.
· A state election tests Germany’s far-right firewall from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Parliamentary elections in the German states of Saxony and Thuringia show large gains for the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party and the left-wing populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht par from the morgue, 1 Sep 2024
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.