German right-wing party scores another victory

The right-wing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, took another big step toward major political power on Sunday by getting its candidate elected mayor of a town.

The success at the mayoral level followed the AfD's first election victory at the district level a week earlier.

The wins came as the party enjoyed record-high levels of support in opinion polls, with pollsters giving it between 18 and 20 percent of the popular vote, putting it on par with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats.

Hannes Loth, who was elected mayor of Raguhn-Jessnitz town in the eastern Saxony-Anhalt state, will serve as the AfD's first full-time mayor. The party has had part-time mayors and unpaid officials elected before in smaller communities.

Raguhn-Jessnitz has a population of around 9,000.

After his win, Loth took to social media to thank his supporters, describing the result as "wonderful" and saying, "I will be mayor for everyone in Raguhn-Jessnitz."

The party's success a week earlier saw lawyer Robert Sesselmann, elected as district administrator in Sonneberg, in the state of Thuringia.

The AfD, which was formed in 2013 to oppose the perceived collectivizing efforts of the European Union, subsequently became known as anti-Islam after morphing against the backdrop of high-profile instances of terrorism. The party has since branched out again, by criticizing the financial policies of Scholz's three-party coalition government, again harnessing disquiet among many voters, in this case about the nation's relatively high rate of inflation and the looming cost of its transition to a green economy.

The party first created waves in 2017 when it secured 13 percent of the vote in a general election. Many pundits expected that success to be short-term.

However, Ursula Munch, director of the Tutzing Academy for Political Education in Bavaria, told German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle that the party has benefited recently from voters perceiving the government as unable to act decisively.

"The politics of the coalition government are unsettling people," she told DW. "And I think people who were also dissatisfied by politics in general are now getting mobilized more and more by the AfD."

Silke Borgstedt, director of the Sinus Institute, told DW the party has also seen a broadening of its base, with its mainly older, poorly educated rural supporters now joined by others.