According to a poll by Politbarometer published on Friday for German broadcaster ZDF, support for the anti-immigration AfD is at 29% – more than any other party in Brandenburg state, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
The center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), currently in government both in the state of Brandenburg and at the national level, polled in second place at 26%, with the opposition Christian Democratic Union at 15%.
The election to choose representatives to Brandenburg’s state legislature is set to take place on September 22.
It comes just weeks after the eastern German states of Thuringia and Saxony held their elections, with the AfD winning in the former and finishing in a close second in the latter.
With its triumph in Thuringia, the AfD became the first far-right party since World War II to win a state election in Germany, after campaigning heavily on the issue of migration.
Elections in the three states are being seen as a test for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD – and his coalition partners, the Greens and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) – before next year’s federal elections.
Scholz and his partners are facing a tough campaign, with populist parties AfD and the recently-formed radical left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) enjoying rising support nationwide amid tensions over migration and recent deadly knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers.
The BSW – which polled at 14% in Friday’s Politbarometer survey – is also skeptical on immigration and, like the AfD, is pro-Moscow and opposed to supporting Ukraine, as well as being anti-EU.
In what it called an attempt to tackle irregular migration, Germany’s government on Monday announced plans to impose
tighter controls at all of the country’s land borders. That decision was criticized by Poland as
“unacceptable”.
