Emmanuel Thomas, DPA, Wednesday, July 05, 2023
BERLIN – The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is backed by 34% of voters in the east German state of Thuringia, far ahead of any other single party, according to a poll released on Wednesday by public broadcaster MDR.
The survey, conducted for the broadcaster by Infratest dimap, comes amid intense political debate in Germany about the rise of the far-right.
The anti-immigration AfD won its first election for district administrator in the state in late June, when Robert Sesselmann was elected in Sonneberg in southern Thuringia.
That was followed on Sunday by a first-time victory in winning a mayor’s seat in a small town in the nearby state of Saxony-Anhalt. Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are two of the six German states that made up the former communist state of East Germany.
The 34% figure is nine percentage points higher than last year, the broadcaster said.
The parties in Thuringia’s current state coalition – the hard-left Die Linke party, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens – together have almost the same percentage as the AfD alone, the results show.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is in second place with 21%, a 1% decline from last year, while the Left Party, with 20%, is down 2% from last year’s survey.
The other parties in the state parliament are also losing ground compared to the last survey. The SPD, the ruling party in the federal coalition, currently has 10%, down one percentage point, while the Greens, who are in the federal coalition, would just manage to enter the state government with 5%, the threshold needed, down two percentage points from last year.
The Free Democratic Party (FDP) the junior federal coalition partner, received 4%, meaning it would no longer be represented in the state parliament, the survey showed.
