MAGDEBERG, Germany — At a lectern in a regional parliament just before Christmas, Ulrich Siegmund begins to set up a joke.

“No one should be forced to pay for disinformation,” Siegmund thunders. He is the floor leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, and he launches into a diatribe against a familiar target: Germany’s giant publicly funded broadcasters ARD and ZDF, institutions comparable to a supercharged blend of PBS, NPR and local public television and radio. Critics, not just from the far-right, have accused ARD and ZDF of runaway costs and a pronounced leftward political bias for many years.

The channels, Siegmund tells his fellow lawmakers, must shrink and report neutrally, “without indoctrination, without all the nonsense.” As one of many examples, he cites a recent documentary titled “Radical Christians in Germany: A Crusade from the Right.” And then comes the joke: “We all know that feeling — you sit on a train and hope that no radical Christian sits down next to you.”

The AfD benches erupt in laughter. Even a member of the center-right Christian Democrats cracks a smile.

Siegmund is tall, slim, telegenic. His graying hair is slicked back; the edges of his three-day beard are precisely trimmed. He wears a tailored navy suit, white shirt and pocket square. When he speaks, even when he attacks, a faint smile flutters on his face.

In recent months, this 35-year-old regional politician has turned into a new leading figure on Germany’s far right, now one of the two largest parties in the national parliament, the Bundestag, neck-and-neck with the Christian Democrats, known as the CDU, and its sister party, the CSU.

Siegmund is already a skilled politician, the kind who can set up what looks like a parliamentary defeat that actually serves to build his political momentum.

Which is exactly what he does next. Siegmund’s caucus proposes that Saxony-Anhalt withdraw from the treaties that underpin Germany’s public broadcasting system. The motion is doomed. A Christian Democrat praises the regional public broadcaster as “reliable,” prompting an AfD heckler to shout: “Yes, for you!” The vote ends 66 to 16 against Siegmund. Support only came from the AfD.

A blowout, but only at first glance. The parliament in the state capital Magdeburg is not Siegmund’s primary stage. Shortly after the speech, he posts a clip on social media under the headline: “This is how they manipulate us.” On TikTok alone, more than 600,000 users follow him; Instagram and Facebook add nearly 300,000 each — more than nearly any other German politician.

The video draws a lot of support. “I’m hoping for an absolute majority for the AfD,” one supporter comments.

That hope may no longer be far-fetched.

Later this year, Siegmund has a realistic chance to deliver the AfD its first outright victory one of Germany’s 16 states. Recent polls put the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt at 39 percent, once even at 40. A gain of just two or three points could be enough for Siegmund to secure an absolute majority in the 83-seat state parliament and take over the premier’s office in the stately Palais am Fürstenwall.

It would be the party’s first electoral prize, one that would surmount what’s become known as Germany’s “firewall” — an unwritten but rigid pact among Germany’s other parties to block out the AfD by refusing any cooperation: no coalitions, no confidence deals, no informal alliances.

They view the party as a force whose ethno-nationalist agenda and repeated extremist controversies violate the country’s postwar consensus, forged to prevent Germany from ever again going down the kind of path that lead to WWII. The AfD’s hardline anti-immigration rhetoric, bouts of historical revisionism, and notably its Russia-friendly posture have made cooperation politically, and for many, morally, untenable. As Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said: “We are worlds apart from that party.”

Most of the time, German parties come to power in states and nationally by forming coalitions. As long as the firewall holds, the only way the AfD can take power is by winning a straight-up majority. Which is what it seems poised to do in the September elections.

Much will depend on how many of the state’s smaller parties fail to clear Germany’s five-percent threshold; Votes for those parties are discarded when seats are distributed, boosting the relative strength of the larger ones. The pro-business Free Democrats and the Greens are currently at risk, as are the center-left Social Democrats and the new left-populist BSW party. If those factions don’t clear the threshold, AfD could win less than half of the vote but take power in parliament with an absolute majority of seats.

And that would immediately launch Siegmund to the forefront of German politics.

Nationally, the AfD is led by 46-year-old Alice Weidel, whose cool, abrasive style attracts attention but little affection. Her co-chair Tino Chrupalla, a 50-year-old painter, appears more down-to-earth yet often awkward. By contrast, the young candidate from Saxony-Anhalt presents a more personable, media-savvy image.

As governor, Siegmund would be the AfD’s first-ever leader tested in a relevant executive office — a role fraught with risk. Success, however, would make him a contender for the party’s top candidacy in the next national elections, presumably in 2029.

For now, Weidel is the front-runner, and Siegmund is smart enough not to challenge her leadership role. His goal, he says, is to help Weidel on her way to become Germany’s first AfD chancellor.

I’m sitting in a small, austere meeting room inside the state parliament in Magdeburg when Siegmund enters, smiling broadly and offering a quick handshake before taking his seat. He pours himself a glass of water and starts talking about my hometown. “You’re from Hanover, how interesting.” Strictly speaking, that’s nonsense. My hometown routinely ranks among Germany’s dullest cities. But the reception is oddly disarming.

I’m here to understand what sets this AfD politician apart from a party so often defined by its hostility to the political “mainstream.” What, if anything, lies beneath his notably softer public manner?

Our conversation follows a pattern. When I ask Siegmund about balancing work and family — his wife works at a school, he is the father of a young daughter — he asks about my own family. He mentions going to the gym twice a week and running a half marathon in just over 90 minutes, and he then asks what sports I do.

In Germany, few politicians master this kind of engaging conversational style. In the AfD in particular, it is highly unusual. The party is notorious for treating journalists with suspicion.

Siegmund even speaks about mainstream rivals without derision. The Free Democrats in his state, he says, are “perfectly reasonable” to deal with. With the CDU’s parliamentary group, “the human side works about 80 percent of the time.” When he passes colleagues in the hallways, they greet each other. In the federal parliament in Berlin, such normality between the AfD and other parties’ politicians would be unthinkable.

Siegmund broke with the CDU more than a decade ago over Germany’s euro rescue policies, which he describes as ideology-driven and economically damaging: “For me, that was the point at which I could no longer, and no longer wished to, go along.” The dispute led him to the AfD.

“What drives me is the determination to step in precisely where Germany needs me the most,” Siegmund says about his political motivation. “For me, Saxony-Anhalt is a first and crucial step toward putting the entire country back on its feet.”

Oliver Kirchner, Siegmund’s co-leader in the AfD caucus and 24 years his senior, says it was during the Covid-19 pandemic that he first recognized the young man’s talent. He is, Kirchner notes, “also visually appealing” and doesn’t make the kinds of gaffes that trigger attacks from his opponents.

The contrast between the two men is stark. Kirchner — short, bald and combative — delivers tirades about “globalist communists” and the “lying chancellor,” barely looking up from his manuscript. He seldom smiles, and if he does, it carries a grim edge. When Kirchner led the party into the recent 2021 state election, the AfD suffered its first ever decline in eastern Germany, slipping from 24 to 21 percent. Soon after, Siegmund rose to the top.

To say the party is on a winning streak because of him is not quite accurate. Rather, Siegmund has a chance of winning despite his party being a drag on his prospects.

The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt has long been plagued by infighting and scandal. A former leader was forced out after allegations of cronyism, megalomania and a speech in which he referred to Turks as “camel drivers.” More recently, the party voted to expel a former general secretary, now a federal lawmaker, over alleged conflicts between his political and business interests. The accused is fighting back, accusing his former colleagues of cronyism and doctored expense trips, including to Disneyland. He has threatened to reveal more.

Both locally and nationally, Siegmund’s own party could prove his biggest obstacle on the road to power.

“I don’t want an AfD premier,” Peter Nitschke tells me. The entrepreneur and president of Saxony-Anhalt’s construction industry association, is meeting me in his office in a village an hour’s drive south of Magdeburg. “But if Mr. Siegmund governs, I’ll live with it. I certainly wouldn’t leave my home because of it.” By contrast, the outgoing CDU premier, Rainer Haseloff, has announced that he would move away if the AfD took power.

I am visiting Nitschke to find out how business leaders in this eastern German state view the prospect of an AfD-led government. In western Germany and in Berlin in particular, any visible engagement with the far-right party or any attempt to question its isolation provokes outrage. In the east, those constraints have been weakening for some time. I want to find out how far this change has progressed.

The Harz, a low mountain range that barely registers for visitors from southern Germany’s Alps, was once the borderland between East and West. Nitschke grew up under the East’s socialist dictatorship. The early 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, were the best years of his life, he says. “Everything seemed possible.”

That spirit, he believes, has since faded: “Germany has become bureaucratic and fearful.” The AfD’s rise is, in his view, the result of a leftward drift among all the other parties on the national level, “including my own, unfortunately.” Nitschke has been a CDU member for decades. He does not support the AfD. But in our conversation, his rejection of the party is free of alarmism.

In his daily life, Nitschke says, there is no political firewall. “If I excluded all AfD voters and members, I couldn’t build a single bathroom anymore.” His state association of tilers, carpenters and road builders would collapse.

This approach differs sharply from attitudes in western Germany and in the country’s capital. In the East, this fear of treating the party as a normal political player is gone, Nitschke says.

Nitschke tells me he last encountered Siegmund at a business-association dialogue in Magdeburg in November. The AfD politician has been courting support from the private sector for some time.

All the state’s parliamentary leaders were invited, Nitschke says, “of course including Mr. Siegmund.” There were presentations and a kind of speed-dating for business representatives: Each political representative had his or her own table, and business leaders could circulate between them, stopping to strike up conversations. Three tables drew the biggest crowds, Nitschke says: those of the CDU, the Free Democrats, and the AfD.

Siegmund had a convincing manner, Nitschke recollects. Part of that, he believes, stems from his professional background. In his mid-20s, before finishing a business degree, Siegmund co-founded a small company producing scented room fragrances. He is still a shareholder.

It probably helps his relations with the region’s commercial interests that Siegmund’s background is more middle than working class. Siegmund’s mother, a civil engineer, died in 2019. His father is an electrical engineer and also now active in local politics for the AfD.

All this may not make him an economic expert, but it has given him firsthand exposure to entrepreneurship, an experience most German politicians lack.

In the parliament of Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt’s economy minister Sven Schulze is stretching his legs beneath a conference table at the end of a long legislative day in mid-December. The CDU’s top candidate for the state election is Siegmund’s only serious rival. Asked what he can do that his AfD opponent cannot, the 46-year-old grins: “Govern.”

Politics, Schulze says, is not about speeches but substance and the value one brings to a state. Beyond his experience as a minister, he cites his networks in Berlin and Brussels as an important political asset, crucial for attracting major investment.

Broad-shouldered and pragmatic, Schulze is, from the AfD’s perspective, a tough opponent: an authentic East German, father of three, trained as an industrial engineer, with years in the private sector. Not one easy to slam as an out-of-touch liberal.

If the AfD were to win outright, Schulze predicts chaos — not fascism, as other CDU politicians might warn, but disorder. “Mr. Siegmund has no governing experience, little substance and no suitable personnel,” he says.

A month after our conversation, the CDU takes a step widely seen as an effort to block Siegmund’s rise. Haseloff, the long-time CDU governor, resigns and the state parliament elects Schulze as his successor. The leadership swap shows the CDU’s nervousness: The party is hoping that the power of incumbency can shore up not only its own candidate, but save the firewall.

Virtually at the same time, the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt makes moves of its own, unveiling a draft “governing program.” It is a radical break with the political mainstream, though hardly a surprising one. The 156-page document, due to be debated and adopted at a party convention in April, nods to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a governance model and demands public arts funding to be redirected away from “anti-German” projects toward work that strengthens national identity. It also proposes a “baby bonus” of €2,000 for the first two children and €4,000 for each additional child, available only if at least one parent holds German citizenship and the family has lived in Saxony-Anhalt for at least a year.

Within the CDU, many expect fierce resistance from Berlin if the AfD were to take power in Saxony-Anhalt. The federal government, they believe, currently led by CDU chancellor Merz, would do everything possible to make life difficult for a state ruled by the far right. One potential lever is the Länderfinanzausgleich, Germany’s fiscal equalization system, which redistributes funds from wealthier states to poorer ones. Saxony-Anhalt belongs to the latter. There could be attempts, the argument goes, to freeze those payments, under the premise that one cannot finance alleged fascists.

The right-wing intellectual and publisher Götz Kubitschek, whose estate lies in Saxony-Anhalt, goes even further. We meet in a restaurant in the medieval town of Naumburg, a two-hour drive south of Magdeburg. He tells me he expects Berlin to invoke Bundeszwang, federal coercion, under Article 37 of Germany’s constitution, allowing the federal government to force a state to follow its obligations.

This would be a dramatic escalation in the republic’s cooperative federal system. How it would work in practice remains an open question – Bundeszwang has never been used in post-war Germany. If, say, Saxony-Anhalt refused to provide the federally required accommodation and basic support for asylum seekers, Berlin could respond by issuing binding directives, potentially through a federal commissioner, compelling state and local authorities to restore those services. It would be a kind of showdown between Germany’s federal and state government that hasn’t been seen before.

Siegmund’s state party still has enormous homework to do before taking on the responsibilities of governing, Kubitschek says. “They have to prepare like the biggest overachievers.”

Siegmund, like most upstarts, sees his inexperience as a virtue. “Maybe we’ll make mistakes,” he concedes. “But worse than today? That’s impossible.” His shadow cabinet, he says, will include seasoned party figures and former politicians from other parties. He is not naming names.

On the evening of September 6, 2026, the name Ulrich Siegmund may remain a footnote in German politics. Or it could enter the history books as the starting point of a right-wing revolution, one that began in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.

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