It’s early July in central Germany and I’m heading up the highway in the back of a black BMW sedan with Georg Maier, interior minister for the state of Thuringia. White cumulus clouds hover above golden-lit wheat fields; pine trees spread across rolling hills and windmills swing their mechanical arms in the breeze. It is almost impossible to imagine an area this idyllic incubating a resentment so deep that it birthed one of the continent’s most expansive neo-Nazi commercial ecosystems, comprising music festivals, guesthouses, and online retailers, netting hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of euros a year.
Over the past several years, sleepy, provincial Thuringia—with a population of just around two million—had become a neo-Nazi hotbed, supplying steady funds and publicity for Europe’s resurgent far right. Two years ago, Themar, the town where we were headed, had drawn around 6,000 far-right music fans—roughly double the town’s population—to the “Rock gegen Überfremdung,” or, roughly, the “Rock against Over-foreignization.” Images of hundreds of men and women flashing “Sieg Heil” salutes, illegal in Germany, had circulated on social media, shocking polite society. This was just the most dramatic manifestation of a much broader phenomenon: Thuringia hosts more than one neo-Nazi concert a week, ranging from a few dozen people to international barn burners like the one I was headed to. Maier came to power just after the Themar concert, bent on stomping out such events—known collectively as Rechtsrock—which he saw as part of a broader far-right effort to accumulate capital, bolster infrastructure, and, ultimately, seize power.
Today, he was going to see up close how that process, and the results of his efforts to disrupt it, were working. “This is my first personal issue—to fight against racism, nationalism, and, yes, the far right, and therefore I have to be there,” Maier told me. “That’s my way of doing politics. I cannot do it from a distance. I have to see it. I have to hear it.”
His antagonist was a young, savvy far-right entrepreneur and organizer called Tommy Frenck, who runs a guesthouse in a neighboring village and had gotten himself elected to local office. Young, goateed, heavily tattooed, and with the short, stocky build of the competitive weightlifter he was in his school days, Frenck had proven a formidable organizing talent, quickly earning a name for himself in the far-right scene. Even Maier, who described Frenck as a kind of “national capitalist,” had to admit that, in a way, Frenck had been able to revive the area’s moribund tourism industry.
Frenck had also gained a reputation for an often prankish social media presence. When, inspired by a similar effort in neighboring Saxony, Maier teamed up with local authorities to get an alcohol ban in place for the weekend, Frenck had posted a picture of himself on Twitter sitting and grinning on a stack of beer crates, tagging Maier. If the interior minister’s efforts failed, Frenck wrote, “I’ll find myself forced to sell all this beer to the nasty ‘Nazis.’”
For Maier, the stakes were existential. About a month earlier, someone had shot dead a local official from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on his terrace in the neighboring state of Hesse. The official, Walter Lübcke, had been a vocal proponent of accepting refugees, and had become the target of far-right ire and frequent death threats after he’d told local members of the anti-refugee movement Pegida: “You have to stand up for your values. If you don’t share those values, then anyone is free to leave this country if they don’t agree.” The suspect in the killing had been a far-right sympathizer. The assassination raised memories of the National Socialist Underground—a clandestine neo-Nazi group, as its name suggests—which murdered ten people with migrant origins from 2000 to 2006 and whose founding members came from Thuringia. “That a person in public life, a politician, would be killed by Nazis?” Maier said of Lübcke. “We knew that some Nazis have weapons. We knew it. But that they would use it? This is really a new quality.”
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Bodo Schackow/picture-alliance/dpa via AP Images
Georg Maier, interior minister for the state of Thuringia, has created a task force devoted to disrupting far-right events.
Far-right violence has surged since Merkel’s 2015 decision to let nearly a million asylum seekers into Germany. Acts such as Lübcke’s killing have been accompanied—in many eyes, encouraged—by the ascendance of Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s most successful far-right party since the Second World War. Starting off as euroskeptics, the AfD later pivoted to anti-immigration and had ridden the wave to become Germany’s third-largest party in 2017 federal elections. They held about a tenth of the seats in Thuringia’s state parliament and were expected to gain more in an October vote. The existence of ties between AfD activists and neo-Nazi groups is hotly debated. But seeing a simpatico ideology catch hold in the mainstream was undeniably giving Frenck and his fellow travelers a boost.
Maier—a slim, serious man with graying hair and a penchant for open-collar suits—had watched all this with alarm. His own parents had belonged to Nazi youth organizations, his father to the Hitler Youth and his mother to the League of German Girls, and this history had helped convince him that complacency was a “poison” for societies. More and more, “normal-looking” Germans had been joining far-right demonstrations. “Families, elderly people, walking together on the street—and not hundreds, but thousands,” he told me. Roughly half of Themar, Maier guessed, believed the concerts should be left alone.
We stopped at a police checkpoint. “Here you can see the first Nazis,” Maier said, slipping into uncharacteristic sarcasm. “Really, really nice people.”
We turned down a street lined by flower gardens and red-roofed half-timbered houses. In happier times, Themar was known mostly as a scenic stop on cycling or river-paddling trips; Maier himself had once toured the area, and suggested I do so sometime as well. Near the end of a medieval wall, we stopped at a police checkpoint, where several portly, black-shirted men stood waiting to be frisked. “Here you can see the first Nazis,” Maier said, slipping into uncharacteristic sarcasm. “Really, really nice people.”
Police wagons packed a nearby field. Troops had been brought in from the states of Hesse, Bavaria, Saxony, and Saxony-Anhalt, Maier told me. A gas station had been converted into operational headquarters. A little way away stood a large white concert tent, festooned with anti-immigrant banners. The scene was set. The ceremonies would soon begin.
HOW DID THE STATE of Thuringia, of all places, become home to such a prominent neo-Nazi music scene? Like everywhere else in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the state boasts higher support for far-right and neo-Nazi movements than Germany at large. But that alone does not explain the troubling phenomenon.
Watchdog groups and Interior Ministry employees offer several causes. First, Thuringia is centrally located, in the heart of Germany and Europe, linked to neighboring states by efficient road and rail. Second, cheap property prices meant neo-Nazis could buy up houses with relative ease, building a real-estate network to hold smaller concerts in private, with almost no risk of police interference—perfect for recruiting young people curious about the scene. MOBIT, a group tracking far-right movements in Thuringia, had counted about 20 of these houses. Most are concentrated in small towns, but some are also in the more left-leaning state capital, Erfurt.
Bodo Schackow/picture-alliance/dpa via AP Images
The German village of Themar
These two factors dovetail with a third: The previous state government had been relatively lax in policing the concerts, activists told me. “I think it’s correct to say that the government ignored it over many years,” Christoph Lammert, a MOBIT consultant, said. “Often it was completely ignored, or the problem was rather the protests against the concert, rather than the concerts themselves.” Thuringia soon earned a reputation for reliable far-right events, a rarity in the neo-Nazi music scene. Sometimes, he said, a concert would be blocked by police in the neighboring state of Saxony-Anhalt on one day only for the same bands and same concertgoers to gather the next night in Thuringia without a problem. “Most of the time, people traveling to Thuringia, they know, ‘Okay, the concert will really happen,’” he said.
In Thuringia, neo-Nazism was soon a going concern. Ticket, drink, and merchandise sales were plowed into more real estate, which meant more concerts, which meant more money, and so on. Far-right organizers were setting up fight clubs and street festivals, spreading their message to young, bored villagers who might otherwise remain apolitical. Large concerts like the one in Themar drew adherents from across Europe, helping cement international networks. When Maier was appointed interior minister in September 2017, he knew he had a dangerous phenomenon on his hands. “On the one hand, there is this kind of business model, and on the other, the political movement,” Maier told me in his Erfurt offices in April. “That’s new—that both come together and fit together.”
Maier, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), saw it as his duty as a German official to ensure that the mistakes of that era were not repeated and that the liberal values that had taken root since then were protected. “We experienced in Germany, more than any nation in the world, what it means, with the concentration camps, with the destroyed cities—the outcomes of the Second World War, the outcomes of nationalism, and so on,” he told me. “This is deep in my heart. I am so convinced that I have to do this.”
Once in office, Maier established a task force of police, intelligence, and legal experts devoted to disrupting far-right events. Last year’s neo-Nazi rock fest had been scheduled to take place in October outside a village called Magdala within sight of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. That weekend, Maier assembled his “war room,” poring over maps and running through strategies. “It was really like a battle on the field,” he said. In the end, they discovered the concert site was reachable by just one road, owned by the village. Local authorities blocked access, forcing the concert to the nearby town of Apolda. Roughly 800 neo-Nazis packed the main square on the first night, but on the second night things got messy. After the first band took the stage, a concertgoer—apparently frustrated by security barriers and searches—chucked a bottle toward the police lines. The police raised their shields and pressed in, fixing the crowd with pole-mounted cameras as helicopter searchlights flashed. The concertgoers dispersed. “Later, you’ll wish we only made music,” one organizer said as he left. Maier tweeted that the event was “an open attack on our democracy.”
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The trouble for Maier was how to fight this threat without undermining the rights and freedoms he wanted to protect. “The Nazis abuse the right of freedom of assembly, and this right of freedom of assembly would be the first right they would abolish if they came into power,” he told me. “So this is the main problem. You want to defend democracy, but you also want … to save the basic rights of democracy. It’s not right for me to forbid these concerts, because then I demolish the right of freedom of assembly.”
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Whether he could succeed was an open question. There had been grumbling after the Apolda debacle, one Interior Ministry employee told me. Some officers felt Maier’s tactics had provoked an unnecessary confrontation. It was hard to say how deep such sentiments ran, but there were hints of far-right sympathies in the ranks. One young policeman had recently shown up at a training session wearing a T-shirt by a far-right brand with the message “Save the white continent.”
Then there were the elections. What would happen if the AfD won? What would become of Maier’s efforts? And what lessons would neo-Nazi organizers draw? “If my strategy fails, then I indirectly supported them, because they can say, ‘We’ve won over the minister. We are powerful,’” Maier told me. “I have to win.”
BY EARLY EVENING, black-shirted, heavily tattooed men and women were trickling into the concert site in Themar, the town where I’d driven with Maier. As they passed through a labyrinth of metal barriers and police trucks, journalists clustered nearby, snapping photos. One concertgoer flipped a middle finger, sparking more shutter-clicks.
I left Maier behind and went inside, where booths hawked T-shirts, sausages, and low-alcohol beer (the next day, the taps would be cut off entirely). Men milled around in brimmed, soft-fabric hats in red, white, and black, the colors of the German imperial flag favored by ultranationalists. Ear expanders and close-cropped haircuts were very much in vogue. The place had a perverse county-fair feel, with hay underfoot and air smelling of energy drinks, sweat, and cigarette smoke. In the main tent, a series of banners advertised a far-right label called PC-Records (“Political correctness—nein, Danke”), a digital TV channel, clothing labels, and the National Democratic Party (NPD)—an ultranationalist party that, unlike the AfD, has never made it to federal parliament. “Deport Islamists, for all of our security,” one banner read.
The shirts—nearly all black—reflected the rich symbology developed to skirt Germany’s ban on displays of Nazi support. Some conveyed legally problematic sentiments by removing vowels: “HACKENKREUZ,” German for “swastika,” became “HCKNKRZ”; “I HEART HITLER” became “I HEART HTLR.” Others kept their references just vague enough to be legal. “Twelve Golden Years,” the name of a band from Apolda, referred presumably, but not explicitly, to 1933–1945. Matching “Adolf” and “Eva” shirts were available, perfectly legal without last names, while another shirt featuring an image of a man in a steel helmet read, “Not all cops are bastards,” above the words “Est. 1933,” the year the Gestapo was founded. New Balance shoes, which feature a prominent “N,” were the clear sneaker of choice; when I stopped to count, nearly half the crowd was wearing them.
Booths hawk merchandise with popular alt-right themes. The bigger the taboo, the greater the thrill. And what bigger taboo than to be a Nazi in Germany?
In this sense, Germany’s ban on Nazi symbols dovetails tidily with far-right trolling culture. Excluded from polite society, the subculture delights in mocking its sensibilities and violating its taboos while maintaining a plausible deniability that the whole thing is just a joke. The bigger the taboo, the greater the thrill. And what bigger taboo than to be a Nazi in Germany?
I stopped to examine one booth where photos showed what appeared to be a pagan ritual attended by torch-wielding men in white button-ups. The man running the booth introduced himself as Christian Häger, head of the Junge Nationalisten (“Young Patriots”), which is affiliated with the NPD. He explained that the images were of a solstice celebration, just one of their many activities, which included education and political outreach. One ad for an anti-drug campaign aimed at children featured a cheerful-looking elk mascot waving to the camera. “He’s a mascot. He should be fun,” Häger explained.
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Concert attendees browse the Ansgar Aryan booth.
He told me that the parking ban had been burdensome—police were making people leave their cars some 15 kilometers from the site. “The parking places should be here, in the field there, 200 meters away,” Häger said, gesturing across the way. Two years ago, he said, “there was no police in the field, no fights, no problems. It was all good.”
Indeed, Maier’s efforts appeared to be having their intended effect. The music was as loud and abrasive as you’d expect neo-Nazi rock to be, but the crowd seemed fairly docile. After an Italian band called Acciaio Vincente took the stage, four men near me started up a mosh pit, which soon petered out. By the set’s end, the crowd was singing, “Olé, olé, olé,” the Spanish soccer chant.
Around midnight from my hotel room, I heard chants echoing down Themar’s medieval-walled streets: Frei, sozial, und national. Free, social, and national. It was a phrase chanted often at neo-Nazi rallies, an apparent twist on “national socialism”—though of course, like all their slogans, not quite apparent enough to violate the law.
THE NEXT MORNING, a counterdemonstration took place across from the neo-Nazi site, featuring a brass band, face-painting, and two-euro tractor rides for kids. A priest delivered a sermon, including a reading in Hebrew. Die Linke, the SPD, the Greens, and other left-leaning, liberal, or antifascist organizations in the area had booths. Apart from a few tattooed antifa members, the attendees were almost parodies of wholesome German townsfolk, chomping on baked goods and sausages in flower-print blouses, sun hats, and short-sleeved button-ups.
Thomas Jakob, who headed the local community group that had been staging demonstrations against Frenck’s concerts, moved through the crowd. Tall, bespectacled, with a round face and button nose, he looked more like the village grocer than the man standing between Themar and a rising neo-Nazi tide. Many people, he said, had told him not to make such a big deal out of the concerts, that if you ignored them, they would go away. “That is one of the reasons in the past few years why these things have become so big,” he told me. “Because they ignored it.”
Sebastian Haak/picture-alliance/dpa via AP Images
Counterdemonstrations are common. The banner these Themar locals carry states they are “For a unified society! Against Nazis and racists in our midst.”
The parking and alcohol bans were working. Even Frenck’s guesthouse, the Golden Lion, would have to stop serving beer at 3 p.m. “These belong together, Rechtsrock and alcohol. It is a must for them,” Maier said. Police were also better trained to identify banned lyrics than before. Last night they’d pulled a band, Sturmwehr, from the stage, explaining the chants I’d heard the previous night.
A little later, on the neo-Nazi side, a dreadlocked antifa man perched on a fence, dangling an empty beer can from a string on a pole. “Last beer before Themar!” he shouted. “And it’s an Austrian one!” Inside, a few hundred concertgoers stood around, drinking soda and water as stagehands performed sound checks and tested pyrotechnic fire shooters, sending up periodic spurts of flame.
Two young men running a T-shirt booth, Daniel and Patrick, were unusually talkative. Their brand, Ansgar Aryan (“Ansgar” is an old Germanic name combining the roots for “god” and “spear,” while “Aryan” is a historical race concept that became closely associated with Nazi ideology) was established in 2008 and was based in the Bavarian town of Mantel, Daniel told me, handing me their “Summer 2019 Catalogue.” Flipping through, I pointed out the Gestapo-themed shirt I’d noticed earlier. Daniel said it was meant as a counterpoint to anti-police sentiments on the left. “We say, ‘Not all cops are bastards,’ because we know a lot of police guys who are on our side,” he said. I asked him about the year, 1933. “I’m not good in history. It’s a random year,” he laughed.
Daniel told me that sales had declined in recent years, not because of low demand, but because more competitors had entered the market. Still, the xenophobic brand maintained customers as far away as Japan. Daniel declined to tell me how much they made, but said that their tax bill had come to around 40,000 euros last year.
Two vastly different visions were competing for Germany’s political oxygen, a contest over not just where the country ought to go, but what it should be.
When I asked to see the best-sellers, Daniel grew unexpectedly sheepish. He flipped to one page showing a phalanx of white-robed and hooded men. “I don’t like the Ku Klux Klan. This is only for selling,” he said.
Didn’t like them? Why not?
“It’s racist,” he said. “I think they only hate black people because they are black. That’s not my opinion. It’s stupid.”
It was a strange line to hear at a neo-Nazi rock concert.
“You don’t have to hate any people,” he said. “From all colors and all religions, there are evil guys and good guys. But this is Germany, and I hope that in Germany in 50 years, most people are still Germans and the religion is Christian.”
He flipped to another best-seller, which showed a tank set against the Eiffel Tower, and the phrase “To France, we only travel on treads.”
“It’s not a good shirt. I don’t like it,” Daniel said. “I like the French guys.”
Daniel was much more animated on the subject of jobs. He’d lost four of them, he said, after getting doxxed for attending right-wing events. “It’s bullshit. You think you live in a democracy, and then you lose your job,” he told me. “You lose your job only for your opinion. You did nothing against the law or something. That doesn’t lead to ‘Oh I like the state now.’ It leads to ‘The state is really broken.’”
I asked about the police crackdown. Like Häger, the parking ban had Daniel concerned. “If Putin did this, you guys would be really reporting about it, but in Germany we are right-wing guys and we have no lobby, and so they can do anything with us.” Previous efforts to stifle the concerts had been easier to counter, he said, as when authorities had pressured portable-toilet companies not to rent to them, and they’d been able to cart in more from Bavaria. “If this is the new strategy, I don’t know what we can do,” he said. “It’s really cheating.”
I left Ansgar Aryan after about half an hour, but had less luck with other vendors. Two men at a far-right radio channel offered a few stiff sentences, and the editor of a magazine called N.S. Heute (“N.S. Today”) showed me a feature about Wewelsburg Castle, controlled by Heinrich Himm-ler and long a subject of speculation about Nazi occult activities. One couple I mistook for normies until I saw the Iron Cross dangling from the man’s chest said they’d come from Bavaria, where such a concert would never have been allowed. Apart from that, I was mostly rebuffed. Even the Italian band, sipping nonalcoholic beer in the back, only broke into nationalist chants when I approached, and then told me, in halting English, to buzz off.
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The Golden Lion, a guesthouse owned by entrepreneur and concert organizer (and local officeholder) Tommy Frenck, serves as an unofficial headquarters for the far right.
FRENCK, THE ORGANIZER who’d so antagonized Maier, was based in the village of Kloster Vessra, about a mile and a half up the road from Themar. I’d seen him interviewed in various German media before, and so that afternoon, I decided to walk up and try my luck. The path led past wheat fields and hills of pines, crickets in the grass and butterflies on little purple flowers, disturbed only by the occasional cluster of neo-Nazis, swigging their last beers as they made their way to the concert grounds.
Just outside town, I spotted two concertgoers leaning over a garden fence, chatting with a middle-aged woman. After a moment, the woman smiled, handed the men two bottles of beer, took a five-euro note in exchange, and went back to tending her garden. She had technically violated the ordinance, and refused to discuss why.
A few minutes later, we arrived at the Golden Lion, a half-timbered cottage-style building with a wooden patio and a sandwich board offering “patriots” a hearty welcome. A booth sold T-shirts while vans ferried concertgoers up to the first police checkpoint, where they had to start walking. Black-shirted customers hovered around, including a pipe fitter from Las Vegas. Inside the guesthouse was a colorful mishmash of images from Nordic mythology and a painting of a First World War sailor. Sentimental guitar music played. Beside a jumble of high chairs and children’s toys, a glass case displayed military paraphernalia, including model tanks, commemorative glasses, and a clock with an Iron Cross and a man in steel helmet reading, “They were the best soldiers in the world.”
Frenck stood in the driveway. He wore camouflage shorts and a black T-shirt revealing tattoos running up his arms and neck. Frenck cuts a colorful figure, and has spent considerable time cultivating his image in the media. He tends to get plenty of coverage, due partly to his idiosyncrasies—he travels often, and has a world map in the bar with colorful pins marking places he’s been—but also because he is one of the few far-right organizers to speak freely to the media. Call him a Nazi, call him a monster, and get your outraged clicks. To Frenck, it’s just publicity.
Far-right organizers were setting up fight clubs and street festivals, spreading their message to young, bored villagers who might otherwise remain apolitical.
Frenck was annoyed by Maier’s tactics. He said he planned to sue the Interior Ministry. At the concert last year in Magdala, he said, courts had actually found the road blockage illegal after the fact. “It’s just a pity that Georg Maier doesn’t have to pay his own money,” he said. “It’s the taxpayer who has to come up with it.” He made pointed reference to the fact that Maier was originally from Frankfurt, a West German city.
In addition to his guesthouse, Frenck runs an online retailer, which he described as a kind of Amazon for right-wing products. The site offers over 8,000 articles, including clothes, CDs, pillows, and shoes, and regularly receives orders from Australia, South Africa, and the Americas. Like the T-shirt vendors I had spoken to, Frenck declined to say how much he made. “Enough to do new projects and to pay all the people and then have some stuff for me. I’m pretty happy,” he said. Then he held out his hand at an upward angle. “What I can tell you is that we are growing up like this.”
In any case, the idea was not just profit. “My mission is, with all my clothes and all this stuff, I will bring back the patriotic feeling—the symbols, the mythology—to the German people,” he told me. By putting their message on shirts, shoes, and stickers, they might help it spread. “If you read the message 10, 20 times a day, they will have it in their brains.”
Frenck’s business model could also provide jobs for far-right supporters who’d been fired from mainstream jobs, while allowing consumers to buy products without worrying the money would go toward liberal causes—a sort of inverse correlate of woke capitalism. For instance, Frenck said, maybe I’d noticed that New Balance was popular. But who knew what they’d do with the money? So Frenck offered a similarly designed shoe stamped with an Iron Cross.
I told him it seemed like he wanted to build an alternative economy.
“That’s what we must do. That’s the way. You have to be independent from the others,” he said.
His ambitions extended into politics as well. Frenck and his allies had formed a small list and had won 16 seats at different local levels. In the upcoming state elections, they planned to back the AfD. Eventually, Frenck said, grassroots pressure was going to force the CDU to at least consider a coalition with the AfD. In any case, he said, the October vote was sure to deliver a blow to Maier. “After the vote, he’s gone,” Frenck told me. “I know that he will lose.”
FOR EVERY FAR-RIGHT demonstration, there was a counterdemonstration; for every sign of impending collapse, a countervailing bulwark. On a drizzly spring day in Apolda, in the same square where Maier’s police forces broke up the neo-Nazi concert last year, the AfD state leader Björn Höcke addressed a tiny crowd. “Islam is not a part of Germany,” he said. A few months later, at a Yiddish music festival in Weimar, just over ten miles away, interwar Jewish cabaret numbers and orchestral compositions urged solidarity with refugees.
Two vastly different visions were competing for Germany’s political oxygen, a contest over not just where the country ought to go, but what it should be. On the centennial of the Weimar Republic, history itself had been put up for debate. Höcke shocked many with a call for a “180-degree turnaround in our policy of memory,” while Alexander Gauland, the AfD’s co-leader, has called Hitler and the Nazis “a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”
Bodo Schackow/picture-alliance/dpa
Germany’s principles of liberalism and multicultural tolerance were being put to a greater test than at any other time since the Second World War. Today, nearly one in five people living in Germany has an immigrant background. Yet in large part the national dialogue has not caught up with this fact. Well into the 1990s, German officials were able to say that theirs was “not an immigration country.” That is the same basic assumption of many Rechtsrock attendees. Take, for instance, the concept of over-foreignization so common at these rallies: The basic idea is that at a certain point immigration ceases to benefit a society and instead begins to erode a native culture’s essence.
Maier’s campaign—with its police deployments, its parking bans, and its task force—was an incredible challenge, fraught with pitfalls, from voter rebellion, to dissension in police ranks, to the moral hazard of using state tools against a particular political ideology. Even then, it was not enough on its own to achieve its aims. What seemed clear to me after Themar was that Maier could do no more than slow the spread. The money might be disrupted, but no matter how many concerts he broke up, the movement and its ideas remained, circulating in private residences and on encrypted messengers like Telegram. Increasingly, they were on the lips of elected officials, with democratic mandates to be where they were, saying what they said.
ON A DREARY rain-swept night in late October, functionaries and candidates of the Social Democrats, Maier’s party, crowded into a timbered medieval hall in central Erfurt, drinking beer and eating pretzels as they waited for the election results. The atmosphere was congenial, but far from festive. The party had been suffering from a national-level leadership crisis, combined with the fallout of years of coalition partnership with the CDU. In vote after vote, it became clear people wanted a change. The AfD had surged into second place in Saxony and Brandenburg the previous month, netting around a quarter of votes in both states. Everyone expected similar results in Thuringia; it was just a question of how bad it would be.
A back room was set up with a large projector and a stage. Local news teams crammed into the room alongside candidates. Jakob, who was running for the seat that represented Themar, was there, as was Maier. For both, the night would be a moment to reflect on their own campaigns against the far right as well as the general political mood.
Chatter died down as the polls closed and a tidily coiffed local broadcaster came onto the screen. The exit polls were not precise, but they tended to reflect the final tally, with grumbles and moans.
Merkel’s CDU was announced first: 22.5 percent, its worst result in state history. A groan ran through the room, as if someone had just taken a nasty tumble.
Next, the SPD: “Eight point five percent,” the announcer read, “Also its worst performance in state history.” The news was mostly met with silence.
And many couldn’t hold in their reaction to the next result. Die Linke came in first, with 29.5 percent—a formidable result, owing largely to its popular local party leader Bodo Ramelow. The AfD had come in second, with 24 percent. The audible cringe was followed quickly by a gasp of true shock as the Greens were announced at just 5.5 percent, killing any hopes of stitching their old coalition back together.
Maier stood stone-faced, and then dismounted the stage to take questions. It was tough to see how the coalition that had put him in power could mount the numbers it needed. Back in April, he’d told me that the polarization of modern politics reminded him of the Weimar days. Tonight’s results had only bolstered this impression, with the parties furthest to the left and right posting the biggest wins.
The AfD, he said, had been offering simple solutions to big problems. “It’s populism, let’s put it that way. We are not a party of this kind. The Social Democrats are always interested in solutions that are possible. This is the difference. On one hand, the populist party, and on the other, the realistic one.”
The detailed election results would show that Maier had lost his district to an AfD candidate by roughly 800 votes, although the double-tiered voting system would allow him to keep his seat. A week later, he told me that the most likely way forward would be an unwieldy coalition including parties with highly divergent views—for instance, the market-liberal Free Democratic Party and socialist Die Linke.
Assuming the AfD did not take the ministry, for the moment an unlikely outcome, Maier said he believed his own legacy was secure. The task force, the alcohol and parking bans—these seemed likely to remain. “We stopped the cash machine for these far-right movements,” Maier told me. “In the past, they could earn a lot of money through these big events, and we stopped this.”
But the broader rise of far-right politics in Thuringia had showed no sign of slowing. Hints of previously unthinkable scenarios had already emerged: In an apparent fulfillment of Frenck’s prediction, 17 local CDU politicians wrote a letter shortly after the vote calling for the party to be ready for coalition talks with “all democratically elected parties,” widely seen as a call to lift the party’s ban on talks with the AfD, although it did not mention the party by name. In one form or another, the fight would grind on.
I asked Maier whether he was worried about the future—whether he thought the AfD’s rise would continue. “It’s difficult to describe,” he told me. “I am an optimistic person. I always think that things will develop in a positive way.” The AfD, he said, was gaining no more or less than any other nationalist far-right party in Europe, and in this sense, their development was not cause for alarm. “But due to our history, in Germany,” he said, “things are always different.”
