The far-right AfD made big gains in Lower Saxony’s local elections

 

The far-right AfD made big gains in Lower Saxony’s local elections on Sunday 13 September, with some of its strongest results in the industrial cities of Salzgitter and Wolfsburg.

They are centres of steel and car production, with powerful traditions of trade union organisation. The AfD’s advance there points to a wider danger—fear over jobs and industrial decline being pulled to the right.

Wolfsburg VW factory

Across Lower Saxony the AfD took 15.9 percent, behind the CDU on 27.2 percent and the SPD on 24.6 percent. In the comparable district-level elections in 2021 it had taken only around 4.6 percent. Its share has more than tripled in five years.

The sharpest breakthrough came in Salzgitter, where the AfD topped the city council poll with a provisional 27.4 percent. The SPD took 25.9 percent and the CDU 23.2 percent.

In 2021 the AfD took just 10.5 percent and five council seats. This time the provisional result gives it 13 seats, against 12 for the SPD and 11 for the CDU. That is a rise of almost 17 percentage points in five years.

The mayoral election showed both the scale and limits of the advance. AfD candidate Patricia Mair took 25.7 percent and reached the 27 September run-off. But CDU mayor Frank Klingebiel was well ahead on 45.6 percent, with SPD candidate Tobias Bey on 19.4 percent. The AfD topped the council poll, but it is still a long way from majority support.

The council figures remain provisional. Salzgitter’s electoral committee is due to confirm the result on 18 September.

Steel town under pressure

Salzgitter is one of western Germany’s major industrial centres.

It is home to the giant Salzgitter steel works and a Volkswagen components plant employing around 7,500 people. VW is investing roughly €2 billion in shifting the plant away from traditional engine production towards battery cells and electric-drive technology.

There is still huge investment going into the region. PowerCo and IG Metall agreed employment guarantees until the end of 2030 for around 2,000 battery workers earlier this year. But investment does not mean security.

Workers are watching industries that shaped whole towns being reorganised around profitability, competition and the shift to electric vehicles. Jobs and guarantees that once looked permanent are being reopened for negotiation.

NDR’s post-election reporting pointed to a weakening local economy and fears over unemployment as part of the background to the AfD result. There is no straight line from economic insecurity to a far-right vote. Migration, national politics, anger at the established parties and the AfD’s own organisation all matter.

But the political battle is over where the fear and anger are directed. The AfD tries to turn them against migrants. It takes insecurity produced inside German capitalism and gives it a racial target.

That is especially dangerous in towns where the SPD once rested on a powerful combination of large workplaces, trade union organisation and expectations of secure employment.

AfD gains in the home of Volkswagen

The result in Wolfsburg was smaller, but still substantial.

The AfD took 17.1 percent in the city council election, almost three times its 6 percent result in 2021. It increased its representation from three councillors to eight.

The CDU remained the largest party on 25.9 percent, followed by the SPD on 22.4 percent.

Again the mayoral result exposed the limits of the AfD’s reach.

Its candidate Thomas Schlick took 14.1 percent. CDU incumbent Dennis Weilmann won outright with 50.1 percent, while SPD candidate Karsten Schneider took 15.5 percent. But 17 percent in Wolfsburg is not a marginal result.

Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg plant employs around 60,500 people and dominates the economic life of the city and surrounding region.

And the vote came during one of the biggest battles over VW’s future for decades. Management is pushing for deeper restructuring and further job cuts. IG Metall and the works council are demanding that VW sticks to the employment agreement reached after mass walkouts in 2024.

Reuters reported just days before the election that management proposals could go well beyond the 35,000 German job reductions already agreed under the earlier plan.

Tens of thousands of workers are being told that jobs, plants and guarantees built up over decades can no longer be taken for granted. The AfD is trying to colonise that insecurity.

Not simply an eastern phenomenon

The results also show why the AfD can no longer be treated simply as an eastern German phenomenon.

The trend was visible before Sunday.

At the 2024 European election, Salzgitter gave the AfD 22 percent—the highest result among Lower Saxony’s districts and independent cities. Wolfsburg gave it 15.7 percent.

At the 2025 federal election, the AfD took 22 percent in the Helmstedt–Wolfsburg constituency and 21.3 percent in Salzgitter–Wolfenbüttel.

Those parliamentary constituencies extend beyond the city boundaries, so the figures are not directly comparable with the council results. But the direction is clear.

For decades the SPD regarded cities such as Salzgitter and Wolfsburg as its natural territory—places built around huge workplaces, strong unions and relatively secure industrial jobs. That relationship has fractured.

In Salzgitter the AfD has gone from a sizeable minority force to topping the council vote. In Wolfsburg it has moved from the margins to become a substantial third force.

That does not make its rise inevitable. Nearly three quarters of Salzgitter voters and more than four fifths of Wolfsburg voters backed other parties.

The fight is over what fills the political space being opened by industrial restructuring and the decline of old party loyalties. The AfD wants workers to look sideways and blame migrants.

Any serious challenge to it has to point the anger upwards—to the employers cutting jobs, the politicians managing decline and a system that makes workers compete for security while profits come first.

But that also means confronting the AfD directly wherever it tries to organise.

Much of official antifascism in Germany ties opposition to the far right to a defence of “democracy”—and by that often means defence of the existing political institutions and social order. That leaves the AfD room to pose as the anti-establishment force, even while its politics offer nothing to workers facing cuts, insecurity and restructuring.

A strong left has to break out of that trap. It has to oppose the AfD wherever it appears, build resistance to racism on the streets and, at the same time, offer an anti-capitalist answer to the insecurity on which the far right feeds.