Ingmar Nolting and Christopher Schuetze spent time this summer in Görlitz District, Germany’s most eastern part, speaking to voters, activists and politicians.
Whatever the outcome of the elections on Sunday in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right Alternative for Germany party long ago stepped from the political fringe and into the mainstream in Görlitz.
Hard on the Polish border, Görlitz’s district in the state of Saxony gave more than 40 percent of its votes to the AfD, as the party is known, in the elections for the European Parliament in June. That was the most of any district in Germany.
Despite the fact that parts of the AfD have been labeled extremist by domestic intelligence, the party has been in the state government for 10 years already. Sunday is now expected to be the first time since the Nazi era that a far-right party will win statewide elections in Germany.
The region, home to vast open-pit coal mines, used to be the engine room of the former East Germany. But since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the many of the mines have closed, taking jobs with them and sinking the economy to near last in the country.
Though their region has fewer immigrants than most places in Germany, many residents are unhappy with what they see as too much money being spent on asylum seekers, migrants and military support for Ukraine.
After he was laid off from the mines in 2001, Klaus-Peter Jerga, 69, helped move the last giant digger a mile up the road to where it sits now, a rusting, 110-foot-tall monument to the centuries of coal mining that once brought this district jobs and prestige.
Today, Mr. Jerga gives tours of the former site, Bagger 1452, which is now an open-air museum. He once voted for the far-left successors of the Communist Party, which ran East Germany until 1990. But not anymore.
“You don’t want to be right wing; you want to have your own opinion,” Mr. Jerga said. “But you can find a lot of things good about the AfD, like border controls, for example.”
He hopes that a new party can re-energize the region, he said. “I’m impatient to see” the AfD come into power, he said.
But even in Görlitz, the majority of voters will not vote for AfD, and activists and other civil society workers are actively working against the party. The far left, too, is strong.
After attending an agriculture school in the west, Marcus Ender, 35, and his wife, Fenja, 33, returned to his home in the village of Tetta to rebuild the family farm that the Communists had taken away from his grandparents and collectivized.
Together with his parents, he focused on organic products, building a small subscriber-based business.
A rare supporter of the Green Party platform in the region, he is part of a movement trying to rejuvenate the countryside and says he is happy to debate his AfD neighbors. “I want to revitalize the village,” he said.
Other farmers in the district joined nationwide protests against the cutting of farm subsidies. Like elsewhere in Germany, in a sign of protest against the federal government, boots are hung from the yellow signs that demark rural villages.
The Fokus Festival is a yearly highlight for Görlitz’s progressive scene, held on the site of a former grain distillery where a left-wing association called RABRYKA runs cultural and educational programs.
There, L.G.B.T.Q. activists mingle with recent arrivals to Germany and unabashed urban leftists. People can learn to salsa, party at the old-fashioned roller skate disco, take in an exhibition on nature or simply hang out.
Organizers are careful to keep politics out of the event, saying their goal is to reduce barriers. Still, for many, the festival is a safe zone where they can enjoy themselves without having to be on guard against their far-right peers.
“I come from a village near Görlitz. To be honest, everyone there is right wing,” said Lucas Kretschmer, 20. He wants to leave the region, he said, but needs to earn the money to do so.
For many, the streets can be an unfriendly place where far-right activists stage weekly demonstrations. On a recent Monday evening, about 200 people gathered to march around the old city of Görlitz and show their displeasure with the government in Berlin.
Along with placards calling for peace, some held aloft the black, white and red flag of the former Reich or the red, yellow and black Wirmer flag, which was originally a symbol of resistance to the Nazi regime. Both flags have been adopted by far-right extremists. (Nazi flags are banned in Germany, and the police keep careful watch for them.)
The chants coming from the loud, angry marchers echoed off the buildings of the old city center. A group of young, mostly blond men dressed in black joined the march. They were peaceful, but the message was clear: The streets are ours.
“I don’t mind having to work for my money, but when I see someone else getting it for free, that makes me angry,” said Andre Kendzia, 42, who was hanging out with friends in his village of Hainewalde, just miles from the Czech border. Mr. Kendzia would not say who he plans to vote for, but said he likes what he hears from the AfD. “I like that they call it how it is,” he said.
He repairs groundwater pumps for one of the few active coal sites left, the last of which is scheduled to close by 2038. “If that goes under, everything here will go under, and only the old will remain,” he said.
Gottfried Hanzl, 74, who has worked as a country doctor in the district for more than 50 years, says most of his patients range in age from 70 to 90, old even by the standards of one of the oldest districts in Germany (49.5 years of age on average).
Many are unhappy with the current government and are ready to vote for the AfD, he said. “People here don’t have it bad,” Mr. Hanzl said. “But they are frustrated and they are looking for release.”
Some, like Anass Halime, 28, who moved to Görlitz six years ago from his native Morocco, have found the atmosphere too unwelcoming. He finally decided to move to the western part of the country, taking his information technology company and four jobs with him.
Despite having done everything he could — joining the volunteer firefighters, learning excellent German — he says he could no longer take the constant trickle of harassment he was subjected to as a foreigner. “Friends warned me about the East before I moved here,” he said.
He was even physically assaulted, he said, but never felt as if the authorities supported him. “I can’t fully trust the system, not a hundred percent — I’ve lost that trust,” he said.
Johanna-Marie Stiller, 28, wants to change that. She is vying for a seat in the state legislature on the ticket of the Left party. She has dressed in a unicorn costume in a lighthearted effort to attract potential voters, but when it comes to her core issue, disability rights, she is serious.
Even so, it is possible her party, the successor of the Socialist Party that once ran East Germany, will not make it back into the state legislature, which would be another first for Saxony. (It is losing much support to a new party on the far left, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance.)
Germany’s other traditionally dominant parties are not having any easier a time. The Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz is so weakened that it, too, may not make the threshold to enter the state house.
Michael Kretschmer, the incumbent Christian Democratic governor of Saxony who calls his party a “rock in the waves,” has called on all supporters of mainstream parties to give his party the vote to prevent a takeover by the extremists. This election, more than any other since reunification, is for the soul of the east.
Read More: The Angry East
