Erfurt, Germany—Germany voted yesterday, and the results feel like a history lesson: a fractured left, a surging far right, and an electoral map that looks like the Cold War never ended.

Last November, the constantly bickering three-way coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) fell apart after just three years. In the wake of the government collapse, the rush to set up snap elections began, and which came to an end on Sunday as Germans went to the polls in their highest numbers since the reunification of Germany in 1990 when 83 percent of eligible voters came out to cast their ballots.

The election went mostly as predicted—for better and for worse. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), will become Germany’s next chancellor. All the parties of the center-left coalition of the previous government did poorly, while the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) doubled its share of electoral votes compared to the 2021 federal election. The AfD officially became the second largest party in terms of voter support in the country.

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To look at a recent electoral map of Germany is like looking at a map of pre-1991, divided Germany, with a clear line between what used to be the national borders between East and West. The former East is a sea of light blue (the party color of the AfD), excepting just a few key districts in urban centers like Berlin, Leipzig, and Erfurt. If the AfD’s influence is not translated into lawmaking power, it is contributing to a deeply disunited Germany with divisions that run along historical lines—a dangerous recipe for Germany and Europe.

In the lead up to the elections, high-level members of the Trump administration expressed their support for the AfD. Musk began consistently posting that the AfD is the “only hope for Germany” since mid-December. He appeared via teleconference to an AfD rally in Halle, an east German town roughly two hours southwest of Berlin and told the crowd in sweeping, existential language that this was “Germany’s last chance, humanity’s last chance.”

The Trump administration’s interference came to a head when, at the Munich Security Conference, Germany’s biggest international conference held just one week before the election, Vice President JD Vance excoriated centrist German political parties for their policy of excluding the AfD from parliamentary voting. The comments were duly received as open hostility from a supposed ally. Incoming chancellor Merz has already said that US interference into the German election was as “brazen” as anything Moscow would have done.

The day before the election, the AfD held a rally in Erfurt, the capital of the east German state of Thuringia, which has long been an AfD stronghold. The headlining act was the leader the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, who is considered extreme even within his extreme right-wing party. A former history teacher, Höcke has been called Germany’s most successful far-right politician since WWII, and Der Spiegel has called him the “real boss” of the AfD. The Nazi references in his speeches have placed AfD Thuringia under formal federal surveillance as an extremist organization.

In just one example of many, his use of the phrase “Everything for Germany,” landed him in court as it violated Germany’s strict laws against using Nazi language (the phrase was a slogan of the Nazi paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung, and is therefore banned). Höcke was convicted and forced to pay a 13,000 euro fine. Similar trials are ongoing, and if convicted, he could face more fines or imprisonment.

Erfurt is a picturesque, small city of around 250,000 residents and a cathedral that looks like an illustration in a fairy-tale book. Perched on a small hill, the cathedral’s spires stand tall against the medieval red roofs, and its wide steps pour down into the old town below. But on Saturday, it was far from enchanting.

Drinking beer and eating bratwurst special to the region, AfD supporters crowded in the square in front of the cathedral to make one final push before the election. Flyswatters branded with the AfD logo were handed out to supporters, a wink to the messaging of the party. While the AfD have never explicitly described immigrants and refugee seekers as vermin—as this would be too close to Nazi language and is therefore illegal in Germany—they have made countless suggestions in this direction.

The crowd was mostly a mix of pensioners, aging skinheads, and the kind of hooligans one finds in east German soccer stadiums. Though there were a few teenagers, too, who mostly stuck together to wave AfD flags and take selfies.

Close to the stage was a stand for the extreme-right magazine Compact. Covering the table in stacks were special editions dedicated to Martin Sellner, the Austrian right-wing extremist who was banned last year from entering Germany, and editions bemoaning a lost great past, with titles like Lost Homeland or, even simpler, Sieg!

Hanging off the table was a banner with the slogan “Ami Go Home” and an American flag army helmet worn by a weathered skull. The slogan is a popular one among right-wingers, some of whom conspiratorially believe that the US still occupies Germany. “Ami” is a pejorative nickname for Americans that traces back to World War II.

But the anti-American messaging is mixed. On the one hand, Americans are responsible for rapacious globalism, the main weapon of which is a two-faced soft power initiative that demands that Germans be supplicant to their US overlords and benevolent to hordes of infiltrating migrants that seek to destroy Germany from the inside. Queer rights, asylum rights, human rights are all part of the US plot against German greatness. On the other hand, the United States gave the world Trump, who agrees with every anti-American sentiment they have. I saw more than one MAGA hat in the crowd and attendees swayed to such country classics as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver while waiting for Höcke to take the stage.

The AfD seems to have taken more than one page from the Trump playbook. Attendees brought their own German flags to wave in the crowd—a rare sight at German political rallies. Among the John Denver, songs of such autotuned AfD fervor played that I wondered if they hadn’t been produced or financed by the party itself. Songs like “AfD, Together Strong and Free” by the musician FloKi, who seemed to focus on traditional Celtic songs before he made an album dedicated to the AfD. A genuinely catchy Europop-bop, the lyrics of the FloKi song make obvious references to Nazism: “First I want to clearly say, I love my land/Germany is my home, here I hold my hand,” and later in the song, “For the roots of our homeland that no foreigner can break, we protect our borders, our rights and our being/For a Germany that we love, strong and pure.”

When Musk addressed an AfD rally a few weeks before, observers commented that the event was unlike a typical German political rally and much more resembled the kinds of party conventions and rallies one might see in the US, with its use of blaring dance music and merchandise. It is also generally frowned upon to express too much nationalism, and one might attend a standard political rally and not see any displays of the black-red-gold German flag. But at that rally and the one on Saturday, German flags waved proudly above the crowd.

Near to the Compact table, was a bubbly, gray-haired resident of Erfurt named Mandy who gave an interview to Japanese news services. “They asked if I’m a Nazi, but I’m obviously not,” she said. “There’s left and there’s right, and I’m in the middle. I’m for common sense, and that’s why I’m here.”

The messaging of the AfD has shifted to focusing on promoting the message that they are interested in returning Germany to “normal,” and that the current situation in Germany is “abnormal.” Just before Höcke took the stage, a promotional video for the AfD played on screens. Alice Weidel, the AfD chancellor candidate, marches through woods; then flashes of AI-generated images of happy Aryans.

As Höcke took the stage, sparklers flashed on each side of the stage. Despite building his political career on scandals that push the boundaries of legal far-right speech, Höcke kept his closing AfD speech before the election focused on a tamer message. He appealed mostly to nostalgia. “Our homeland and our culture is fading like a photo without a frame” he said, painting a picture of “how Germany once was.”

He told the cheering crowd, “It is time for us, it is time for normality, it is time for Germany!”

Höcke also attacked the “cartel party” system of Germany, perhaps analogous to Trump’s attacks on the “deep state,” throwing blame at the centrist parties that continue to exclude the AfD from governance. He praised Vance’s speech the previous weekend in Munich that excoriated German centrist parties as undemocratic for their exclusion of undemocratic voices, represented by the AfD.

“I know that American interests and German interests were not always on the same page,” he said. “But what Trump and his team are doing is amazing, fighting against wokeism and for freedom of thought.”

“Then we stand on his side and fight his fight, too,” he continued.

When I asked afterward what people thought of this pro-American attitude, multiple people told me that it liking Trump didn’t mean embracing the United States. “It’s not pro-American to love Trump,” Bruno R., 64 from Erfurt, said. Wearing a Punisher T-shirt, he explained that it’s more about shared values. “Trump wants what we Germans want, and we support that. No immigrants, no green nonsense, no wokeism, only what’s good for us and our homeland.”

Closing his speech, Höcke turned to the international stage, noting that the German far right had an opportunity for allyship on both sides of the great powers. No longer would Germany be caught in the middle between two warring great powers; with AfD, Germany could finally lead.

“We now have a situation where in the US there is a president who had a German great grandfather,” he said. “And on the other side, we have a Russian president, who lived many years in Germany, who speaks fluent German, who loves German culture. What a fantastic constellation.”

In a post on social media—written entirely in capital letters—Trump sent his congratulations over the German election. He did not mention either Merz or his party by name, referring to “THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY IN GERMANY” and argued that Germany’s shift to the right was due to his own leadership.

“MUCH LIKE THE USA, THE PEOPLE OF GERMANY GOT TIRED OF THE NO COMMON SENSE AGENDA, ESPECIALLY ON ENERGY AND IMMIGRATION, THAT HAS PREVAILED FOR SO MANY YEARS,” Trump wrote. “THIS IS A GREAT DAY FOR GERMANY, AND FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF A GENTLEMAN NAMED DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Just next to the square in Erfurt where the rally was held, there is another castle on a hill. From there you can see the spread of red roofs and church bells. From above, it was possible also to see the size of the counter protest, a group of mostly young protesters hoping to drown out the far-right rally. They were separated by rows of police cars, but it was easy to see that counter-protest nearly doubled the size of the AfD rally. Although the state of Thuringia voted for the AfD, the city of Erfurt was a tiny island of pink in a sea of light blue. The city voted for an MP from Die Linke, the party that has now become the definitive voice of the urban German left. From the vantage of the hill overlooking the city, it looked like a community divided but one where many still committed to choosing a brighter future instead of a return to Germany’s darkest history.