Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, is projected to win Sunday's election in Saxony-Anhalt with about 40 percent of the vote, against roughly 20 percent for the governing CDU. The party's top candidate, 35 year old Ulrich Siegmund, has been labelled Germany's most dangerous man by Der Spiegel, and German intelligence classified AfD as right wing extremist in 2025.
The state's Jewish community, about 1,100 people out of roughly 100,000 formally affiliated across Germany, carries a specific history with this threat: a gunman attacked the synagogue in Halle in 2019. Max Privorozki, who heads the Halle Jewish community and sits on the state Jewish association's board, and Central Council of Jews in Germany president Josef Schuster have both described the party as antisemitic. AfD's own manifesto in the state avoids explicit reference to the Holocaust or Nazism, and deputy state chairman Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who wrote it, said plainly that all of that happened a long time ago and no longer affects us.
The community's dilemma is that AfD is not the only option they distrust. Die Linke, the far left alternative most likely to draw votes away from the far right in a state government, is strongly critical of Israel, leaving Jewish voters choosing between a party classified as extremist by their own country's intelligence service and a party whose criticism of Israel unsettles them for different reasons. Artur Abramovych chairs a roughly 25 member group called Jews in the AfD, a small but real sign that even that choice is not unanimous inside the community itself.
Dennis Baum, the US based heir and spokesman for the Jewish founded Simson motorcycle company, has spoken out against the party bearing down on the state that once housed his family's business. Since the state government controls police funding and security support, whichever party governs Saxony-Anhalt after Sunday will decide, in practical terms, how seriously the community's protection is taken, regardless of what either side says about it now.