The AfD is trying to improve its chances in the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with an attempted moderate candidate for the office of Prime Minister. Your candidate, Leif-Erik Holm, is not on the state list, but is a member of the AfD in the Bundestag and co-state chairman. The AfD state association in Baden-Württemberg follows the same pattern, where Markus Frohnmaier is also not running on the state list.
At least In the north-east, the AfD’s chances aren’t that bad. For months, the regional association has been polling at over 30 percent – well ahead of the SPD with 25 percent, the CDU with twelve percent and the Left also with twelve percent. For the state election on September 20th, state chairman Enrico Schult set the election target of 40 percent. “The The SPD’s time is over, the age of the AfD has begun“, he announced hopefully at a party conference in January.
In the 2025 federal election, the AfD was particularly popular among workers: 38 percent support – 17 percent more than in 2021. “The workers’ red is now blue,” the AfD posted before the election. If the polls are correct, the party could more than double its share of the vote in this year’s election. In 2021, the AfD reached 16.7 percent.
The AfD has been represented in the Schwerin state parliament since 2016. With her electoral success, she replaced the NPD, which had sat in the state parliament since 2006 and which now appears as Die Heimat. To this day, the AfD benefits from both the pre-political appearance and the parliamentary work of the home milieu. This provides right-wing extremists with a stable voter base. Internal conflicts, personal power struggles, do little or no harm to the AfD among voters.
Noise in the national association
In the past few weeks, the chairman of the state parliamentary group, Nikolaus Kramer, had been fighting for first place on the state list with his deputy, the co-state chairman Schult. Schult had already made his claim last summer, Kramer in December. Neither of them have been party friends for a long time.
At the state party conference in January, Schult prevailed with 164 of 249 delegates compared to 82 delegates. The candidacy could no longer be voted on in a one-on-one meeting, as Schult had probably hoped.
The noise is probably the agreements made by Holm, the candidate for prime ministerand his co-country chief Schult about their roles in the election campaign. Party leader Kramer is said not to have been involved. The 49-year-old former police officer may have appeared too radical.
In Kramer’s podcast entitled “Extra-parliamentary resistance – Quo Vadis IB (Identitarian Movement, editor) and regime change from the right”, the right-wing extremist thinker Martin Sellner speaks of a “democracy simulation” that needs to be overcome and emphasizes that the “population exchange” must be stopped. Kramer, who says he has known Sellner for a long time, does not object.
AfD state leader Schult described Friedrich Merz as Pinocchio Chancellor and the CDU as a “small party”
Recently, the chairmen of the East German AfD state parliamentary groups presented a “Schwerin Declaration”. They are committed to the people, nation and homeland and want to realign the media, judiciary and the protection of the constitution. Kramer was photographed in public with Björn Höcke.
State leader Schult deliberately appears more moderate. But the 46-year-old is no less radical. At the party conference, the trained surveyor described the Federal Chancellor as “Pinocchio Chancellor”, described the state CDU as a “small party” and the coming “tail of the dog of the SPD”. He promised: “We will make them single digits.” The voters need ““Don’t be afraid” of an AfD sole government to have.