The German far-right party AfD won its first mayoral presidency this Sunday in a medium-sized city, in Pirna, in the east of the country, a new local victory that confirms the rise of this Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party.
According to results announced earlier this evening, far-right candidate Tim Lochner has won the second round of elections in this city of 40,000 inhabitants in the state of Saxony, not far from Dresden and the border with the Czech Republic.
With 38.54%, the head of a carpentry company defeated his two rivals for the position of mayor in these local elections, for which the current leader of the municipality did not run for re-election.
The victory of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) consolidates the rise of the party, which is currently riding the wave of public dissatisfaction with the governing coalition made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, inflation and the measures to protect the climate. .
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, praised a “historic result” for her party in a post on the social network X.
With national results of around 20% of voting intentions, the far-right party regularly surpasses Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the polls, behind former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU, but well ahead of the Greens and Liberals (FDP) .
The coalition government’s popularity has just suffered another blow thanks to a stern warning from the Constitutional Court, which rejected the government’s budget plans in mid-November, leading to the urgent adoption of cost-cutting measures.
The AfD’s results are even higher in eastern Germany’s regional states, including Saxony.
Next year, regional elections will be held in three Länder (states) of the former GDR, in Saxony, as well as in Thuringia and Brandenburg, the region around Berlin, elections in which the AfD hopes to consolidate its gains. At the end of June, the party won the leadership of a local government in Thuringia.
The AfD, which was founded ten years ago, already has 83 seats in the Bundestag (the German parliament).
Source: DN
