Separate children with disabilities from other students at school. Create a “civic guard” of volunteer citizens to support the authorities. Start an “expulsion and remigration offensive”, with more detention centers and flights organized directly by the Land to repatriate foreigners.
They are not slogans uttered during a rally. These are some of the proposals written in black and white in the program with which the Alternative für Deutschland aims to conquer Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday 6 September. The vote could become a watershed for the whole of Germany: according to the latest polls the AfD is at 42 percent, twenty points ahead of the CDU, stuck at 22.
For the first time the German far right can therefore concretely approach the leadership of a Land. And this is precisely the importance of his program: understanding what would happen if a party that until now has mainly been opposition gained control of ministries, schools, police, administration and public funding.
Disabled children outside mainstream classes
One of the most immediate changes would concern schooling, a subject over which in Germany the Länder have extensive powers. The AfD program explicitly dismisses as a failure the current model of inclusion, i.e. the possibility for students with disabilities to attend the same schools and classes as other children with the necessary support.
The judgment used in the manifesto is very harsh. According to the AfD, pupils with disabilities would not receive the attention they need in inclusive classes, would have difficulty fitting in and would end up slowing down the progress of lessons.
Hence the promise: “we will immediately put an end to inclusion and strengthen special schools”. More precisely, therefore, the project does not simply consist of creating a few differentiated classes, but of bringing the Förderschulen, the specialized institutes for students with particular educational needs, back to the center of the system.
It is one of the points on which a possible AfD government would have the greatest possibility of actually intervening. Education is in fact mainly the responsibility of the Länder and according to the German media, school is one of the sectors in which the conquest of Saxony-Anhalt would allow the party to quickly make a change.
And it doesn’t end here. The AfD wants to replace the obligation to attend school with a more generic obligation to education, thus opening up to homeschooling; choose teaching materials centrally; cancel funding for projects such as “School without racism” and at the same time create special classes for refugee children. At the same time we read about strengthening the teaching of Russian and school exchanges with Russia.
The “remigration offensive”
But it is on immigration that the manifesto builds its broader project. The second chapter directly bears the title “Immigration and remigration”. The AfD claims that Saxony-Anhalt’s reception capacity is exhausted and considers an “expulsion and remigration offensive” necessary.
The word is not left completely vague. In the program the “global remigration policy” is divided into three components: the return to Germany of German workers who have emigrated abroad, the forced expulsion of foreigners who are obliged to leave the country and voluntary return programs for irregular immigrants.
A new structure for remigration, led by a dedicated commissioner, should coordinate everything. The funds currently used for figures who help the integration of foreigners would be used to finance “remigration consultants”.
But concrete measures go much further. The AfD has planned 100 million euros for an “expulsion offensive”, and to considerably increase places for detention awaiting repatriation. Tools such as house arrest in reception facilities and electronic bracelets are also hypothesized.
The program also promises to cancel the current constitutional right to asylum, essentially transforming it into a concession from the State, and to abolish the principle according to which under certain conditions a child born in Germany to foreign parents can acquire German citizenship, returning to privileging the principle of descent. However, to obtain these results, a regional government would have to go through the Bundesrat and obtain changes to federal legislation and, in the case of asylum, to the Constitution.
A “third column” of security: the civic guard
Then there is security. Point number 20 of the relevant chapter bears a title that leaves little room for interpretation: “Introducing a voluntary civic guard”. The AfD claims that police and municipal offices are no longer sufficient to guarantee order and security and therefore proposes to build what it defines as a “third column of the local security architecture”.
Ordinary citizens would be part of it, employed in their free time after having attended training courses. They would receive a small tax-free salary and would be formally subordinated to the relevant municipal offices, carrying out support activities for the police and municipal agents.
The manifesto specifies that these guards should not replace policemen. And, unlike what has been written in some reconstructions, the point dedicated to the Bürgerwacht does not explicitly provide for volunteers to be armed. However, the principle remains politically significant: introducing patrols made up of normal citizens into the public security structure, transforming them into a stable institutional presence in the area.
The AfD’s cultural revolution
School, immigration and security are only the most immediately applicable parts of a much broader project aimed at “radically reshaping” the Land. The underlying theme is a battle against what the party considers the liberal consensus of recent decades.
The family made up of father, mother and children is proposed as a model to be favored. The program argues against “sexual deviations” and non-reproductive lifestyles. Public TV is considered part of a system that needs to be downsized. Cultural funding should favor works capable of contributing to the construction of a “German identity”.
Even the Bauhaus, one of the world symbols of twentieth-century German culture and born in this region, becomes a target. The AfD criticizes modernism and wants to replace the regional slogan “Think modern” with “Think German”. The historical parallel is particularly sensitive: the Bauhaus was persecuted by the Nazis and closed in 1933.
And then there is Russia. The party wants to rebuild economic and cultural relations with Moscow, interrupt the current policy of isolation and even relaunch school exchanges with Russian students. It is a position that intercepts a feeling that is still very present in the former eastern Germany and which clearly distinguishes the AfD from the federal government.
How much the AfD can really achieve
This is the decisive point. The “Magdeburg Manifesto” mixes measures that a regional government could implement relatively quickly and objectives over which it would have no direct power.
School, culture, regional police, Land administration and funding are areas on which an AfD majority could concretely intervene. Foreign policy, sanctions on Russia, citizenship rights or cancellation of the constitutional right to asylum depend instead on the federal government, the Bundestag, the Bundesrat or European rules.
But this is probably precisely the political significance of the program. Saxony-Anhalt is not just thought of as a region to be governed. It is proposed as a laboratory.
If on Sunday the AfD managed to transform the 42 percent recorded in the polls into a majority capable of governing, for the first time many of its ideas would emerge from the programs and rallies to directly confront the German institutions.
And this is why the vote in one of Germany’s least populous Länder has suddenly become a national event: what happens in Magdeburg could show, for the first time, what an AfD in power really means.