Is this the most dan­ger­ous man in Ger­many?

Published by The Daily Mail (21st August, 2026)

The scene in the vil­lage of Moeser seemed like a typ­ical sum­mer bar­be­cue – except for the long line of people queuing to grab a selfie or auto­graph from a 35-year-old man in a white polo shirt under a blue awn­ing.

It would be easy to assume he was a vis­it­ing film or pop star with his sharp hair­cut, friendly smile and beefy body­guards as I watched him back­slap­ping men, charm­ing women and jok­ing with excited chil­dren.

When he went up to the stage to give a short speech, there were loud cheers from the crowd, chants of his name and bursts of applause.

Yet he is a politi­cian. His name is Ulrich Siegmund. And next month he might win power in the state of Sax­ony-anhalt, becom­ing the first far-right nation­al­ist to run a state gov­ern­ment in Ger­many since the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s.

His fans see him and his pop­u­list Altern­at­ive for Ger­many (AFD) party as saviours of their troubled nation. ‘We stand for free­dom. We stand for once again stand­ing up for our own coun­try and our own people,’ he told me.

To many other cit­izens, however, Siegmund is a chilling reminder of the darkest days in their coun­try’s his­tory – and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is tak­ing urgent steps to ensure that his pro-rus­sian party can­not under­mine Ger­man secur­ity or thwart Nato defences.

There are fears that if inter­na­tional con­flict erupts, a vic­tori­ous AFD could block the trans­port of troops and weapons through the state – which sits in a pivotal pos­i­tion close to Ber­lin in the former East Ger­many – and that the party could abuse access to intel­li­gence.

The day after I met Siegmund, the coun­try’s lead­ing news magazine Der Spiegel branded him ‘Ger­many’s most dan­ger­ous man’ on its cover, claim­ing that behind the glad-hand­ing and smiles lies an extrem­ist net­work that fright­ens even his own side.

Some res­id­ents are pre­par­ing to flee for other parts of Ger­many. Migrants fear they will be forced out. And the Prot­est­ant bishop in this small state where Mar­tin Luther launched the Ref­or­ma­tion five cen­tur­ies ago is urging voters not to sup­port him.

‘The Afd’s polit­ical pos­i­tion, based on its pro­gramme, can­not be recon­ciled with Chris­tian­ity,’ said Friedrich Kramer, Regional Bishop of the Evan­gel­ical Church. ‘The AFD opens its door very widely towards the extreme Right. They speak of the Nazi era as a “speck of bird drop­pings” in Ger­man his­tory.’

Ger­many – like many coun­tries in Europe – has seen pop­u­lism surge on both Left and Right amid rapid eco­nomic, social and tech­no­lo­gical tur­moil.

Until now, however, the AFD has been blocked from power by other parties form­ing coali­tions to build a brand­mauer, or fire­wall, around them. The AFD won in neigh­bour­ing Thuringia two years ago – gain­ing 32 per cent of the vote and com­ing nine points ahead of its closest rival – only to be kept out of office after three Left and Right-wing parties joined forces.

But on Septem­ber 6, Sax­ony-anhalt votes in a poten­tially seis­mic elec­tion, with the two most recent polls put­ting the AFD on 42 and 43 per cent. This sug­gests it could secure an abso­lute major­ity, that no fire­wall would work and it could take office for the first time.

‘Sax­ony-anhalt is only the first step,’ Siegmund told me. ‘We want to achieve this throughout the coun­try. In the com­ing years, I see more states led by the AFD and then – by 2029 at the latest – we will be in Ber­lin.’

Given the Afd’s widen­ing lead in national polls, this is not an out­land­ish pre­dic­tion – and sup­port­ers are flock­ing to the state to aid Siegmund’s march to power. ‘It starts here and from here it goes on, and everything is pos­sible,’ declares his cam­paign song.

This party’s soar­ing pop­ular­ity comes des­pite the fact that Ger­many’s Office for Pro­tec­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion – the domestic intel­li­gence agency – last year form­ally des­ig­nated the AFD as an ‘extrem­ist entity’ after a three-year inquiry, per­mit­ting it to intensify sur­veil­lance of the party and spark­ing calls for a ban.

‘If you have can­cer and 42 per cent of your body is full of can­cer, do you give up the body or do you try to con­tain the can­cer?’ replied one prom­in­ent MP in Ber­lin when I ques­tioned the wis­dom of out­law­ing a pop­u­lar polit­ical party in a demo­cracy.

This pivotal elec­tion comes just 13 years after the party was launched to oppose Ger­man-fun­ded European Union bail­outs under former chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel.

The Afd’s pop­ular­ity – and rad­ic­al­ism – grew after the 2015 migra­tion crisis, when Merkel opened the bor­ders to at least one mil­lion migrants and refugees in response to the war in Syria. Some lead­ing fig­ures even star­ted to echo Nazi slo­gans and call for Ger­many to down­play Nazi crimes.

‘We Ger­mans, our people, are the only people in the world who have planted a monu­ment of shame in the heart of their cap­ital,’ said Bjo­ern Hoecke, a firebrand AFD leader, refer­ring to the Holo­caust memorial in Ber­lin.

Siegmund was among hard­liners repor­ted to have par­ti­cip­ated in a secret meet­ing three years ago to dis­cuss a remig­ra­tion ‘mas­ter­plan’ with mass deport­a­tions of asylum seekers and ‘non-assim­il­ated’ cit­izens. He called for his home state to become ‘as unat­tract­ive as pos­sible’ to those being tar­geted, sug­gest­ing even ‘for­eign res­taur­ants should be put under pres­sure’.

Now this slick cam­paigner – who has more than half a mil­lion Ins­tagram fol­low­ers and insists ‘Ger­many must become more Ger­man again’ – might be just days away from run­ning Sax­ony-Anhalt, to the delight of those attend­ing the Moeser bar­be­cue.

‘I don’t see any far-right extrem­ists here, just people from the middle – and if you want to argue the toss, I feel more threatened by Left-wing and Green extrem­ists than I do from the Right,’ said Anna, an office worker attend­ing with her mother.

Jenny Guet­tler, 30, stand­ing beside her two sons, said the AFD was the only party that saw the scale of their prob­lem with immig­ra­tion. ‘People who are dan­ger­ous, who can­not afford to be here, they should go,’ she said bluntly.

The state cap­ital of Mag­de­burg – eight miles from this AFD cam­paign event – was the scene of a ter­rible ter­ror attack two years ago when a Saudi refugee drove a car into a Christ­mas mar­ket, killing six and injur­ing 299 people.

The mur­derer was not an Islam­ist, however, but a psy­chia-explained trist help­ing people to flee reli­gious per­se­cu­tion. Many of its sup­port­ers link migra­tion with crime. ‘I feel unsafe as a woman,’ said Guet­tler.

‘Since 2016 you get cat­calls, you get looked at, you even get touched. Yes, that was my first memory of immig­ra­tion in 2016. It felt so ali­en­at­ing.’

Peter Pavelzeck, 68, a retired mech­anic, was wear­ing a shirt emblazoned with the flag of the former East Ger­many. He how he served as a young man in the Com­mun­ist regime’s army – then told me he felt the big issue was peace and the need to restore rela­tions with Rus­sia. He quoted a say­ing attrib­uted to Ger­many’s 19th-cen­tury leader Otto von Bis­marck that for peace to exist in Europe, the Rus­sian Tsar must be at the table. ‘That’s how I see it with Vladi­mir Putin – he should not be excluded,’ said the pen­sioner.

Such atti­tudes alarm many main­stream politi­cians as their coun­try rap­idly rearms, espe­cially after incid­ents such as the drone that was found heav­ily laden with explos­ives next to a Ukrain­ian cargo plane earlier this month at the air­port in nearby Leipzig.

The AFD wants Ger­many to lift sanc­tions on Rus­sia, restore Rus­sian energy links and end the arms flow to Ukraine – a move that would severely wound Kyiv since Ber­lin has become its biggest sup­plier of weapons. Its Sax­ony-anhalt plat­form seeks to restore Rus­sian-lan­guage les­sons in schools. The party’s deputy leader, an ideo­logue reportedly lined up to be edu­ca­tion min­is­ter, has defen­ded Putin’s inva­sion of Ukraine and trav­elled to Rus­sia to wave the AFD flag in protest against West­ern val­ues.

No won­der Moscow’s pro­pa­ganda and dis­in­form­a­tion machine is inflam­ing the AFD cause – espe­cially given that Siegmund has said he might abol­ish the state intel­li­gence agency.

Since Ger­many’s 16 states run their own police and local intel­li­gence ser­vices – a post-nazi safe­guard designed to thwart another Gestapo – there are con­cerns the AFD might pre­vent Nato troops cross­ing its ter­rain in a war or that the party could leak crit­ical inform­a­tion.

Roderich Kiesewet­ter, an MP with the rul­ing Chris­tian Demo­cratic Union party and former army col­onel, said the fed­eral gov­ern­ment was dis­cuss­ing how to get around this in the event of a crisis and over­ride a state’s jur­is­dic­tion if the AFD took actions such as, for example, block­ing rail­ways to stop the trans­port of Nato troops. ‘In the case of a state of emer­gency or the Bundestag invok­ing of zus­tim­mungs­fall [emer­gency crisis laws] to guard against threats, fed­eral police could then take over cer­tain respons­ib­il­it­ies. This is pos­sible. It has never been exer­cised or prac­tised but the Interior Min­istry is now think­ing about it,’ he said.

‘The AFD is offer­ing to repeat the his­toric mis­takes of the past… they tend to accept Rus­sia as a lead­ing power while regard­ing France, Bri­tain and even the United States as dec­ad­ent powers.’

Behind the rise of the AFD lies the shadow of Ger­man reuni­fic­a­tion in 1990. There was massive dis­rup­tion across the former East Ger­man regions after much of its industry col­lapsed along with the Com­mun­ist regime, lead­ing to the per­cep­tion that the region had been neg­lected by a polit­ical estab­lish­ment largely rooted in the West.

Sax­ony-Anhalt, which was formerly in East Ger­many, has lost a quarter of its pop­u­la­tion since reuni­fic­a­tion – and those who left to build new lives in the West were often young, well edu­cated and female. Now the state is the nation’s old­est demo­graph­ic­ally – and it has the biggest gender imbal­ance among 18 to 29-yearolds, with 121 young men for every 100 young women.

‘Reuni­fic­a­tion was more of a takeover by the West. This led to the feel­ing of being treated as second-class cit­izens. That feel­ing has las­ted until today. Inter­est­ingly, it’s been passed down through the gen­er­a­tions,’ said Ker­stin Volkl, a polit­ical sci­ent­ist at Mar­tin Luther Uni­versity in Halle who stud­ies AFD voters.

Volkl believes this mood of resent­ment fuels extrem­ism. She showed me data sug­gest­ing that sup­port for dic­tat­or­ship and for ‘trivi­al­isa­tion’ of Nazi-era crimes are strongest in this state. More than one in ten voters approve of the idea of dic­tat­or­ship.

‘The AFD has become increas­ingly rad­ic­al­ised, par­tic­u­larly in Sax­ony-anhalt,’ she said. ‘Ulrich Siegmund is their friendly face. He’s extremely good rhet­or­ic­ally. He’s cha­ris­matic. He’s the fig­ure­head for the AFD. The hard­liners are in the back­ground.’

The pro­spect of this ultrana­tion­al­ist party tak­ing power – over­see­ing uni­versit­ies and schools along with arts, police and pub­lic broad­cast­ing – scares many voters in the state that I met last week.

Speak­ing to two eld­erly women eat­ing ice creams on a bench in Mag­de­burg, I asked for their views on the AFD. One shot back that she wants the party elim­in­ated. ‘Weg, weg [Gone, gone],’ said Karen, 75, with an angry wave of her hand. ‘They have Nazis in their ranks and that is not accept­able at all. We have had all that before. His­tory is repeat­ing itself.’

Even some people who worry about immig­ra­tion levels admitted to alarm. ‘I would not vote for the AFD out of a deep-rooted sense of fear,’ said Birgit, 55, a physio­ther­ap­ist.

‘You don’t know how they will turn out but there is a fear they will be far too rad­ical. When it comes to policy on migra­tion, for­eign­ers who have built lives here may be forced to leave. But at the same time, there is too much migra­tion. So you feel torn between two extremes.’

Oth­ers worry their own lives may be uprooted. ‘My father is from Rus­sia. I grew up here, this is my home, but in their eyes I am seen as dif­fer­ent,’ said Leon Soko­lov, 20, an aerospace engin­eer­ing stu­dent. ‘They just want to make lives more dif­fi­cult for people with a migra­tion back­ground. Maybe in the end it will be fine.

They can­not do that much at state level to throw people out. But if they won nation­ally, there would be a lot more prob­lems since eco­nom­ic­ally they want to exit the EU and remig­rate people.’

Mohammed, 24, an asylum seeker from Iran, is leav­ing for the west of the coun­try next month. ‘It is because of the situ­ation here,’ he said. ‘There are many good things in Ger­many – I can find a job, I can study, trans­port is good – but some­times in Sax­ony-anhalt, bad things hap­pen.’

Like oth­ers I spoke to, he told of suf­fer­ing racist abuse in shops and trams.

A Ger­man-born med­ical stu­dent, whose par­ents are from Nigeria, said he had faced a lot of hos­til­ity, includ­ing being called the N-word in hos­pital and when using pub­lic trans­port. ‘When it hap­pens to me now I just laugh,’ said David Ojo, 24. ‘The prob­lem is the AFD nor­m­al­ises hos­til­ity.

‘It legit­im­ises the ideo­logy that immig­rants are the prob­lem. I worry a lot about that. You go to the hos­pital here and the hos­pital does not work without immig­rants at every level.’

Yet the dis­con­tent felt by many Ger­mans runs far deeper than just over migra­tion. A study by the State Agency for Polit­ical Edu­ca­tion – a national body for the pro­mo­tion of demo­cracy – found migra­tion ranks first among con­cerns for AFD sup­port­ers but only fifth for all voters after schools, jobs, cost of liv­ing and trans­port.

‘People want something dif­fer­ent without neces­sar­ily know­ing exactly what they want to be dif­fer­ent,’ said the dir­ector Maik Reichel, a former Social Demo­cratic MP. ‘If you ask them what should change, they say ‘everything.’

He argues that – as in the 1930s – people have lost a belief in auf­steigs­varsprechen, the tra­di­tional prom­ise that the next gen­er­a­tion will be bet­ter off. So they are fall­ing for ‘mes­si­anic fig­ures’ prom­ising drastic change for the nation and a sense of hope.

Some experts sug­gest the AFD needs to be tested by a period of being in power, although Reichel fears they could make huge changes to the arts, edu­ca­tion and soci­ety over five years in gov­ern­ment. ‘Who wants to be the guinea pig in that situ­ation?’ he asked plaint­ively.

The voters in this state may soon answer his ques­tion if they hand power to the AFD.