David Farrar: They’re anti-immigration, not Nazis

A lot of media reporting on the election result in Saxony-Arnholt. It has two million people and is in former East Germany.

Their Parliament is called a Landtag and they just went to the polls. The results so far are:

1. AFD 43.8% (+23%), 39 seats (+16)
2. CDU 17.2% (-19.9%), 15 seats (-25)
3. SPD 9.3% (+0.9%), 8 seats (-1)
4. Alliance/Greens 8.9% (+3%), 8 seats (+2)
5. The Left 8.6% (-2.4%), 8 seats (-4)
6. BSW 5.3% (+5.3%), 5 seats (+5)
7. FDP 2.6% (-3.8%), 0 seats (-7)

So a huge swing from CDU to AFD.

You need 42 seats to govern. The AFD are not quite there but a grand coalition is hard to see.as The Left and BSW are very hard left parties and if CDU tries to govern with them, it will not be pretty. So CDU either has to let AFD govern, or form a coalition of every other party in the Landtag, or another election (which would help AFD).

The AFD has unsavoury elements to it, to put it mildly. But I don’t think people should see the vote for them as a vote for returning to the Nazi past. The vote for them is basically that people didn’t like having 1 million Muslim immigrants come in, and they see AFD as the only party that will stop further immigration.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders