It has been quite a week in far-right European politics. Reform UK, a party that only recently (according to the polls) seemed set for government, met for a conference in Birmingham, which hosted Jordan Bardella, president of National Rally.
At around the same time, men wearing balaclavas to hide their identity and dressed in black from top to toe turned up in their hundreds in Dover, bringing the port to a standstill. A similar crowd appeared a few days later in Portsmouth. These people were not visiting the seaside to catch the last sunshine of the summer. They were protesting about boats bringing migrants from France. Bardella and Farage were promising, if elected, to stop these same boats altogether.
One might think black shirts in Dover were ominous enough. However, it was a small and little-known region of Germany that provided the biggest omen. Saxony-Anhalt is not far from Berlin. Among its sons, it can claim Luther, Handel and Nietzsche. For political hero, it can claim Bismarck. It was part of East Germany before reunification. The state is the poorest in the country, with an ageing population and a gender imbalance in favour of males. It is said that after the Berlin Wall came down, it was mostly young women who left the area in search of jobs.
Into this economically depressed region came a young, charismatic individual born just weeks after the country was reunified. Ulrich Siegmund smiled a lot. He smiled even when he was complaining about journalists. When Der Spiegel called him the most dangerous man in Germany, he didn't take the magazine to court for libel; instead, he bought as many copies as he could afford and signed them as souvenirs for his admirers.
With this relaxed attitude, he has made it hard for the mainstream press to demonise him. Intimidating balaclavas are not his style. Instead, he employs charm. His favourite campaigning method is to ride around on a cute-looking vintage scooter, the kind once mass-produced in East Germany.
He is young, yet he pedals (quite literally) nostalgia for a time before the crises that led to successive waves of refugees, those from Syria, obviously, but also those from Ukraine. For Germans unhappy with economic decline and with Friedrich Merz, the most unpopular chancellor ever, Ulrich Siegmund is the opposite of dangerous. He offers a renewal of the country and permission to feel pride in its culture.
So why has his success caused such widespread anxiety in Germany? The first clause of the 100-day programme of his party, the AfD, says that “from the first moment” of being in power it will deport people it deems “irregular migrants”. That is to say, there will be wholesale deportations, including people with full citizenship. Meanwhile, migrants will be required to do menial work.
In the recent past, the party has dabbled in Nazi imagery. It has distinguished between “biological” and “passport” Germans. Such policies have rendered them too extreme even for France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen. On the other hand, they are greatly admired by Elon Musk.
