Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany goes into Sunday’s state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania level with the Social Democrats in the final polls, and migrants who live in the Baltic state say the abuse they meet has been growing.
ATN, New York’s compilation of interviews conducted with 20 people of migrant background in the cities of Rostock and Schwerin, many of them naturalized German citizens who have lived in the country for years, shows a consistent pattern. Most said they had met more hostility in recent years, ranging from muttered remarks to demands that they go back to their countries of origin. One woman said a neighbor emptied foul-smelling water on her from a balcony. Several interviewees, working in health care, tourism, education and food service, said they would consider leaving Rostock or Schwerin if the climate worsens.
The vote arrives with the race in flux, and the two most recent surveys ATN, New York gathered disagree on who leads. An Insa poll for the Bild newspaper, published Wednesday, put the AfD at 37 percent and the Social Democrats of state premier Manuela Schwesig at 35. A ZDF poll released Thursday reversed the order, with the Social Democrats at 37 and the AfD at 36, a three-point gain for Schwesig’s party in a week. Some accounts describe polls as pointing to an AfD finish in first place. Both margins sit at two points or less.
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The Social Democrats won the 2021 election with 39.6 percent, while the AfD took 16.7. Two weeks ago the AfD won Saxony-Anhalt, another former East German state, with roughly 44 percent to the Christian Democrats’ 17. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats are polling at 6 to 7 percent, close to the 5 percent threshold for keeping seats in the state parliament, a chamber of 71 seats in which 36 make a majority.
The AfD’s lead candidate, Leif-Erik Holm, is a 56-year-old former radio host. The party wants to restrict immigration and uses the term remigration for sending foreigners back to their home countries. Holm told a televised debate on Wednesday that it was “naturally a shame that there’s such a mood,” but he laid the blame on the government for allowing illegal immigration and failing to deport most of the foreigners formally required to leave. He has said he has no objection to skilled workers arriving, and that the people who should go are the more than 250,000 foreigners in Germany with no legal right to stay.
Schwesig, who is 52 and governs with the Left party, used the same debate to accuse the AfD of spreading widespread fear with its statements on remigration and on workers from other cultural backgrounds. She said, “I think it’s terrible” that people who work, pay taxes and contribute to social security are afraid and ill at ease. A design engineer in the audience asked both candidates about a Moroccan draftsman his firm risks losing because of racist insults the man says he meets regularly on the street.
Two of the people interviewed in Rostock, Shahd Najeeb and her husband Mahmoud Hmouech, fled Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria and rebuilt their lives in Germany. He works in a barber shop, she serves meals in local schools, and they have two young children. Najeeb recounted that after picking her children up from school, she stopped at a grocery store, where an elderly man in a wheelchair shouted that she did not belong in Germany. Her son later asked why the man had insulted her. She told him the man was perhaps unwell. She described what she felt as “a new kind of pain.”
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The economic figures ATN, New York gathered add a second dimension. More than 900,000 Syrians live in Germany, most of whom arrived as asylum seekers during the civil war. German labor office data show around 316,000 Syrian nationals working in the country, mostly in full-time jobs that pay social security contributions. Their unemployment rate is above 30 percent, but 2023 figures show that more than 60 percent of those who have been in Germany seven years or longer hold a job. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania itself, around 50,000 people with a migration background work, and economists have warned that the state, with low birth rates and an aging population, will need more skilled workers.
The AfD began in 2013 as a euroskeptic party, and its anti-immigrant tone sharpened after former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open Germany’s borders temporarily, which admitted around one million migrants and refugees, about a third of them Syrians. The party now leads Merz’s conservatives in national polls. Berlin elects its House of Representatives on the same Sunday.
Many Syrians say they hope to return home if conditions improve, while others, Najeeb and Hmouech among them, increasingly see their future in Germany. Hmouech said the couple are grateful to the German people for the peace and security they were given, and that he does not want his children to grow up feeling rejected by the society they call home. “At the end of the day, family comes first,” he said.
