None of which makes the party harmless. Björn Höcke, who leads its Thuringia branch, was convicted in 2024 for using a banned Nazi-era slogan and fined again for the same offence weeks later, and the völkisch tradition he speaks for is genuine. But that tradition has been available in Germany continuously since 1945 and it won almost nothing at the ballot box for six decades. What changed in Saxony-Anhalt is not the supply of the ideology. It is the demand for it.

So the question worth asking is not whether the AfD resembles the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). It is why 43.8 per cent of voters in one federal state were willing to hand it power, when the party polls around 30 per cent nationally and far less in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg. The answer lies in a division that reunification declared closed in 1990 and never actually closed.

Saxony-Anhalt is one of the poorest states in the federation. Its economic output per head is roughly three quarters of the national average, unemployment runs above the national rate and median earnings for full-time workers sit below it, according to Deutsche Welle's survey of the state's economy.

There is chemical work around Leuna and Bitterfeld, and machinery and automotive supply, but nothing on the scale of Wolfsburg or Stuttgart. Where the great German industrial names do operate in the east, they operate plants. The headquarters, the research divisions and the boards remain in the west. When Intel abandoned the semiconductor complex it had promised to build in Magdeburg, the state lost the story it had been telling itself about its future.