Thousands of Germans have staged protests against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) after the party’s watershed victory in a state election, warning it posed a danger in two more polls this month. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

Demonstrators at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate held a peaceful pro-democracy rally denouncing the anti-immigrant, pro-Russian AfD, which has called for mass deportations of asylum seekers and a rollback of state support for renewable energy and public broadcasting.

The party captured its best-ever state result in the former communist eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, with clear momentum heading into regional elections in the capital and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, on the Baltic coast, on 20 September.

Police reported 5,000 protesters, while organisers said they drew more than 14,000 people in a campaign to mobilise voters against the AfD. Posters in the crowd read: “Fascism is no alternative”, “Stop the Nazi AfD: end racism and cuts to social services” and “History has its eyes on us”.

With less than two weeks to election day, demonstrators at the Berlin rally cautioned against resignation and cynicism after Sunday’s shock result.

The AfD’s nearly 44% vote in Saxony-Anhalt, the best for a nativist party since the Nazi period, is a “disgrace that makes you furious and stunned”, Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the memorial at the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, said from the stage.

Wagner sounded the alarm that the AfD, although it fell just short of an absolute majority, was on the brink of taking power in Saxony-Anhalt, a first for the far right since the second world war. That “should not be accepted in silence”, he said.

Max Schneller, 17, a member of the far-left Linke, from Saxony-Anhalt, said activists in the state would fight any attempts by an AfD government to target minorities. “We will not start categorising our neighbours according to their origin, religion or skin colour – we are too humane to hate,” he said to loud applause.

The AfD is three votes short of the support necessary to form a government under its candidate, the media-savvy firebrand Ulrich Siegmund, who hopes to peel off dissenters from the remaining parties willing to play kingmaker.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has since 2023 listed the state chapter of the party as rightwing extremist, saying it poses a threat to democratic norms.

Hundreds of anti-AfD protesters also gathered in Potsdam, near Berlin, with rallies also organised in Münster, Göttingen, Dresden, Aachen, Bamberg, Darmstadt, and Halberstadt, in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD captured nearly half the votes, local media reported.

In Halle, the region’s second largest city, leftist groups and civil society organisations have been staging a protest camp since election day.

The AfD is leading in voter intent polls in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with about 35%. However, the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD) of the state premier, Manuela Schwesig, mounted a remarkable comeback over the summer and is now scoring above 30%.

In Berlin, one of Germany’s 16 federal states, the picture is more mixed, with several parties jockeying for first place. It is governed by a coalition of conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) and the SPD.

The CDU, the party of chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose record unpopularity is reported to have weighed heavily with voters in Saxony-Anhalt, holds a wafer-thin lead in the capital, with about 20%.

Hot on its heels is the Linke, which has focused on soaring housing costs in its campaign, and the AfD, followed by the SPD and the ecologist Greens, both polling in the mid-teens.

Merz has vowed to stay in office and fight for a signature package of painful reforms, arguing the only way to defeat the AfD is to get Europe’s top economy moving again and repair its creaking social welfare system.

However, the SPD, his junior coalition partner, has indicated its willingness to backtrack on some of the most unpopular measures to shore up support for the embattled government.

Analysts say the dispute could further destabilise the shaky coalition.