German citizens in the district of Sonneberg in the eastern state of Thuringia, on Sunday, June 25th, firmly rejected the country’s liberal-globalist establishment in a district council election that saw the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) candidate—for the first time in the party’s 10-year history—cruise to victory, marking a historic breakthrough for that party whose popularity has surged to record highs in national polls.
AfD politician Robert Sesselman easily defeated incumbent district administrator Jürgen Köpper (CDU), garnering 52.8% of the vote in the municipal office run-off election, despite leaders from the country’s five establishment parties—SPD, Greens, FDP, CDU, and the Left—having called on local voters to mobilize in support of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) candidate, the Berlin-based newspaper Junge Freiheit reports.
Köpper, for his part, collected just 47.2% of the vote, despite the collective support he received from the mainstream parties.
The election result—which comes 14 days after the first round of voting where Sesselman won 46.7% of the vote, just short of the absolute majority needed to win outright—marks the first time that an AfD candidate will serve as a district administrator in Germany.
The AfD’s historic victory prompted strong reactions from all sides, with some politicians from the CDU, which so far has refused to cooperate with the AfD on any level, expressing doubts over the concept of a united front against the right-wing party.
Björn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, hailed Sesselman’s victory, insisting that it’s not only demonstrative of the party’s recent precipitous momentum but also a prelude to more victories at the local and state elections.
“And then we’ll prepare for the state elections in the east, where we can really create a political earthquake,” Höcke said at an AfD election party on Sunday, referring to next year’s state parliament elections in Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony.
Sesselman, a lawyer and currently a member of the Thuringian state parliament, echoed Höcke’s remarks. The AfD is “on its way to becoming a people’s party,” he said, adding that the party “can make history next year.”
AfD federal co-leader Tino Chrupalla, who was present in Sonneberg alongside fellow party leader Alice Weidel, also said that this was just the beginning. “We convince majorities with our politics for the interests of the citizens. In this way, we will achieve a turn for the better for Germany,” he wrote on Twitter.
Reactions from the AfD’s establishment opponents, unsurprisingly, were far less enthusiastic, with Thuringia’s Interior Minister George Maier (SPD) calling the election’s outcome “an alarm signal for all democratic forces.”
“We must now put the AfD in political terms,” Maier said. “The democratic parties must show that they can do better,” he continued, adding that it was time to “put political interests aside to defend democracy together.”
The reaction from Ulrike Grosse-Röthig, the state chairwoman for Die Linke (The Left), was even more melodramatic. “This is a fatal election result,” she said.
Reactions from CDU members and those aligned with the party took on a slightly different character. Both Jan Redmann, CDU parliamentary group and party leader in Brandenburg and member of the CDU federal executive board, and the former head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, called into question the effectiveness of the CDU aligning itself with left-liberals in a so-called ‘united front’ against the AfD.
“The concept of uniting ranks against the AfD has reached its limit. Instead, we must conduct the relevant debates between the democratic parties, otherwise, the political culture becomes impoverished,” Redmann said.
Speaking similarly, but far more critically of the CDU itself, Hans-Georg Maaßen said that although Köpper was the “best candidate the CDU could put up in Sonneberg,” he lost not “due to him, but to the fact the majority of voters perceive the CDU as a green-woke party led by a Blackrock lawyer.”
The AfD’s landmark victory comes as the party, according to the latest opinion polls, is the second most popular party in the country, ahead of all the parties in the ruling ‘traffic light’ coalition.
