HALLE, GERMANY — Everywhere Ulrich Siegmund goes, an influencer follows — streaming live from the campaign trail. Siegmund is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) candidate running for governor in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. But Siegmund needs neither influencers nor journalists.
The 35-year-old former marketing man is a TikTok star in his own right and his party is comfortably leading polls Sunday's state election, which could make the AfD the first far-right party to lead a German state government since World War II. Siegmund has almost half as many followers on the platform as people eligible to vote in this small state. He makes a point of taking time to answer their questions personally, often from the comfort of his back porch.
In every video, he's dressed in a flawlessly ironed white polo shirt or starched white dress shirt — the uniform of Germany's newly professionalized far-right. His carefully coiffed side parting is as immaculate as his smile, something which distinguishes him from the rest of his party whose members tend to grimace rather than grin. But Siegmund's broad smile rarely cracks, even when he speaks his mind about the party's biggest issue, immigration and the mass deportation of migrants.
The incongruity is striking. The polished, affable politician is also a proponent of one of the hardest-right positions in contemporary European politics. In a recent TikTok post, Siegmund asserts that it is "unacceptable that our doctors are leaving for Switzerland, Norway, or elsewhere because they cannot tolerate the conditions here, while we bring in doctors from India or other places to replace them." The AfD's platform states that "culturally foreign" health workers often fail to meet German medical standards and "endanger patient well-being." Siegmund refrains from going into such detail on camera and he keeps his campaign speeches snappy — full of pep talk rather than policy.
The real detail is something former AfD supporter Hannes Kreschel addresses instead. The 23-year-old law student attends AfD election rallies to talk to voters on camera. Over a beer and bratwurst, he points out disparities between the AfD's carefully crafted campaign and its actual policies, particularly its economic policies which, he argues, only add up for the financially well-off.
Some chats are more constructive than others, he says. "They try to hit the microphone and they try to hit me," Kreschel says. "Of course we're confronting them with facts, but I try to be nice because I think you should separate the people from their talking points." Kreschel posts the exchanges on his own channels which, while popular, do not get the same traffic as the AfD candidate.
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