The German patriotic party AfD surged to record results in state elections in Hesse and Bavaria Sunday, marking the biggest gains for the AfD in usually left-green West German states, despite a secret police and media campaign to stop them that culminated in an assassination attempt on party leader Tino Chrupalla last week.
The AfD came in third place in Bavaria at 14.6% behind the ruling RINO Christian Social Union at 37% and their mostly rural, farmer-backed coalition partners called the Free Voters at 15.8%. That means 67.4% of Bavarians voted for conservative or right-wing parties. The left-wing Greens fell to fourth place at 14.4% the social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz scored a miserable 8.4% in conservative Catholic Bavaria.
In the southwestern state of Hesse, home of the financial hub of Frankfurt, the AfD came in second place at 18.4%, with 34.6% for the Christian Democrats and ahead of the Social Democrats at 15.1% and Greens at 14.8%.
That means the Christian Democrats could form a conservative majority in Hesse with the AfD, the only two parties to gain in the polls. However, the RINO Christian Democrats have said they will not talk to the AfD, instead aiming to form a coalition government with the Germany-hating losers from the Greens or Socialists.
The AfD is already the top-ranked party in the former East German states of Mecklenburg (32%), Saxony (26%), and Thuringia (22%), where people vividly remember communist dictatorship and are much better at seeing through state propaganda than in the complacent west.