Dr Oliver Hartwich: New purge to give totalitarian control of police, schools, prison, bureaucracy of German state

Observers of European politics know Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a right-wing, populist party, probably extreme, certainly friendly to Russia. Less visible from the outside is that the AfD is not an ordinary opposition party that might win an election, govern badly and then be voted out.

The AfD’s goal is to change the fundamental structures of the German state. While such a transformation is still some distance at the federal level in Berlin, a small eastern German state called Saxony-Anhalt already shows what this means in practice. The changes are beginning before the AfD has even taken office.