Young CDU Premier Schulze Battles AfD's Historic Rise in Eastern German State

Sven Schulze repeats the same line at nearly every campaign stop: it's far from decided. The message lands flat most of the time. He is the 47-year-old state premier of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany's youngest, and he is running out of time to convince voters that the far-right Alternative for Germany—classified by the country's domestic intelligence agency as "confirmed right-wing extremist"—should not lead a state government for the first time since World War II. The election is September 6. The AfD is polling at over 40 percent. Schulze's Christian Democratic Union sits at around 23 percent.

He took office only eight months ago, at the end of January, when his predecessor stepped down after nearly 15 years. The timing was deliberate: a sitting premier traditionally enjoys what strategists call an incumbency bonus. Schulze is betting that bonus, combined with the mathematical reality that no other party will partner with the AfD, gives him a path. If the far-right party falls short of a majority, he could assemble a coalition of three or more partners and remain in power. "We are fighting for every single voter right now," he told Deutsche Welle in early August. The state has 2 million inhabitants. He has been cycling through towns in a jersey and helmet, handing out ice cream on hot days, holding small group conversations. He is trying to make himself visible, tangible, local.

Schulze is a qualified industrial engineer and father of three. He was 11 when the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified. Now he is acutely aware that his party leader, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, is deeply unpopular across the country. So Schulze has built a deliberate distance. His message to voters: he is not in Saxony-Anhalt to sell Berlin's agenda. He is there to carry Saxony-Anhalt's concerns to Berlin. This positioning has irritated some in Merz's government, but Schulze has not backed down.

He has also taken an unusual gamble on celebrity. Dieter Hallervorden, a 91-year-old comedian and actor born in Dessau—a city in Saxony-Anhalt famous as a center of the Bauhaus movement—has appeared with Schulze at four campaign events. Hallervorden is a household name in Germany but was not previously known as a CDU supporter. At these appearances, he has criticized the federal government's defense and arms export policies. During one performance, an image of protesters holding a banner reading "Stop the genocide in Gaza" appeared briefly in the background. The venues filled. These ranked among Schulze's best-attended events. When party headquarters in Berlin objected sharply, Schulze defended the partnership on principle: he does not share all of Hallervorden's views, he said, but he shared the stage to demonstrate his commitment to free speech—something the AfD, he noted, seeks to abolish.

Dessau's Bauhaus legacy has become a campaign flashpoint. The movement, which began in 1919, revolutionized modern art and architecture. The Nazis tried to suppress it when they took power in 1933. Last year, an AfD representative in the state parliament, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, described Bauhaus as a "wrong track of modernism"—language lifted directly from a 1928 book by architecture critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg, whose ideas influenced Nazi ideology. Schulze has seized on this as evidence of the AfD's true ambitions: a return to Germany's darkest periods. He has also pointed to the fact that the AfD sings the anthem of East Germany—the communist dictatorship that ruled the eastern half of the country until 1990—at the end of its party events. "When the AfD sings the GDR anthem, it shows exactly what it wants: a return to the days of the GDR," Schulze told Deutsche Welle. "And I do not want us to wall ourselves in again, as happened here before."

His campaign strategy has been to pull focus away from national and international politics and toward the concrete concerns of Saxony-Anhalt itself. He highlights local businesses that depend on foreign workers and export markets. On healthcare and elderly care, he has resisted the federal government's push to adopt without debate the recommendations of a commission that critics say would cut public services. This directly contradicts Merz, who has said those recommendations should be followed exactly. Schulze has vowed to keep the conversation local, to trust the people of Saxony-Anhalt to decide their own future. At times, he strips away the nuance entirely. "This election," he has said, "boils down to Sven Schulze or the AfD." The vote will test whether a young, sitting premier can use incumbency, coalition mathematics, and local focus to hold back a far-right party that has never been closer to power in a German state.