Saxony-Anhalt handed the far right its strongest result in Germany since the Second World War, built on a platform of deportation and cultural defunding. The moment is a test of how secure any minority's place in German public life still is.
Roma and Sinti did not need Tino Chrupalla's joke explained to us. On 29 August, at a campaign rally in Grimmen, in the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the co-leader of Germany's Alternative for Germany (AfD) used a slur that was itself a Nazi-era racial classification.
A cache of weapons found in a forest near Berlin — which German intelligence suspects was a drop point for Russian agents preparing acts of violence — had probably been lost by Roma “looking for mushrooms”. The oldest stereotype in the book — Roma as criminal or backward people — exploited for cheap political gain. The crowd laughed.
Nine days later, the AfD won 43.8 per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt — the strongest result any far-right party has recorded in a German state election since the Second World War. Eighty-two years after 2 August 1944, when more than 4,300 Roma and Sinti were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the party is on the verge of leading a state government.
A coalition with BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht's anti-NATO, left-populist party, would give the two just enough seats for a majority, though neither has confirmed anything. The country's mainstream parties, none of which came even close, have met this moment with perplexity — and growing doubt that the “firewall”, meant to keep the AfD out of power works, has cost it nothing at the ballot box.
Minorities and migrants targeted
Roma have always been among the first communities targeted by racism and exclusion. That does not mean it ends with us.
The AfD is anti-immigration and sympathetic to Moscow, and its Saxony-Anhalt branch has been classified as confirmed right-wing extremist by the state's own intelligence service, with party members convicted for knowingly using Nazi slogans. A party like that polling above 40 per cent is a direct threat to Germany's other national minorities, several hundred thousand strong, and to the more than 4 million foreign nationals who currently hold only a temporary residence permit.
What begins with words and stereotypes rarely stays there. The incoming AfD leadership has pledged to begin deporting irregular migrants “on day one”, with its programme built around “Remigration” — removing people with a migration background regardless of citizenship, implying that belonging rests on ancestry and ethnicity instead.
The party also wants to replace the constitutional right to asylum with a discretionary “grace right”, create a deportation task force, and put refugee children into separate school classes.
Muslims are named just as directly. The AfD programme wants mosques built so they are not “recognisable as oriental ornamental structures from afar”, rejects the call to prayer and minarets, and wants to end Islamic religious education in schools because Islam “does not belong to Germany”. The party's own deputy faction leader, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, has described the approach as interpreting the law “as strictly as possible” — testing exactly how far it can go before a court stops it.
The consequences of the party's rhetoric are already here. Germany's national reporting body on antigypsyism, MIA, recorded 2,076 incidents in 2025, up 24 per cent on the previous year. In the same period, Germany's Jewish community leaders have voiced similar alarm, and the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency recorded 6,236 antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2024 alone.
Culture and cohesion
The AfD thrives on an “us versus them” narrative — and increasingly, culture is where that battle is fought. The Bauhaus, the modernist design school founded in Weimar in 1919 and based in Dessau — now part of Saxony-Anhalt — reshaped architecture and design worldwide and remains one of the state's proudest cultural exports.
Building on the ideas of Bauhaus, the EU launched the New European Bauhaus in 2021, an initiative that helps create places that are not only environmentally friendly, but also inclusive and beautiful to live in.
But the AfD brands it an “aberration of modernism” lacking national rootedness. Its cultural spokesperson wants funding recipients to declare “I am for Germany, I am not against Germany”; Chrupalla himself has announced a financial review of NGO subsidies. Defunding culture and civil society are not incidental to this politics — it is the plan.
In its own way, the far right understands that culture is where social cohesion is formed, and this is where our response must lie.
European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, which I lead, has made fostering Roma culture and identity its core mission. Roma culture remains one of the few spaces of consistent, positive contact between Roma and non-Roma, and it is uniquely positioned to answer bigotry: transnational in character, rooted in humanity, coexistence and shared heritage.
Culture helps us win back spaces the far right is trying to occupy: the same streets in Gelsenkirchen's Ückendorf district — where AfD state MP Enxhi Seli-Zacharias and other party members handed brooms to residents they took to be Roma, pressured them into sweeping, and filmed it for online circulation in June — are now home to this year's Manifesta 16 Ruhr.
This European art biennial is running until 4 October, featuring work by the Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas alongside a public programme with the Roma musician Riah Knight. This alone will not stop a party polling above 40 per cent, but it is a reminder of what those brooms were trying to sweep away: a Roma presence in German public life that is creative, contributing and impossible to reduce to a stereotype.
Mainstream parties and the EU should be defending investment in culture, not retreat from it. We need minorities, allied institutions and public figures to push back harder against the rhetoric that undermines our democracies. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern votes next, on 20 September, with the AfD polling at around 36 per cent. Whether Saxony-Anhalt was a warning Germany heeded, or just the first of many, will not take long to find out.
