Quotes of the Day

Uwe Leichsenring seems like a typical bürger from small-town Germany. He lives with his wife and child in the tiny village of Königstein in the former East German state of Saxony, where he owns three driving schools and is a member of the town council. Leichsenring, 37, was celebrating last week after being elected to Saxony's state parliament. But he's not your typical candidate. He's a leader of the National Democratic Party (NPD), an extreme-right-wing movement that the German government has tried unsuccessfully to ban because of its neo-Nazi leanings. Leichsenring acknowledges that his campaign was partly based on the slogan grenzen dicht! ("Close the borders!"), but maintains that the NPD is not xenophobic; it merely wants to turn away immigrants, who, says Leichsenring, bring down wages. "We have nothing against foreign tourists," he argues, "but we have problems when workers come from the east and take German jobs."

Those concerns touched a nerve in Saxony, where unemployment in places tops 20%. The NPD won 9.2% of the vote and took 12 seats in the state parliament, its best showing in more than three decades and a dramatic setback for the country's main political parties, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) and the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU). The CDU lost its absolute majority in Saxony's parliament and will now have to form a coalition to run the state, while the SPD won only 9.8% of the vote and took just one more seat than the NPD. It was a similar story in another eastern state, Brandenburg, where the far-right German People's Union won 6.1% of the vote and will have six seats in the state parliament. The far-left Party of Democratic Socialism, the heir to East Germany's Communist Party, won 28% of the vote and 29 seats — its largest share ever. The votes for extremist parties in Brandenburg and Saxony underscore popular discontent with both the SPD and CDU, a trend that could upset the country's traditional two-party system in the run-up to the 2006 general election.

Until September, the NPD seemed like a spent force. But in 2000, after a series of attacks against foreigners and Jews was blamed on right-wing radicals, the government began efforts to ban the NPD. Last year the Federal Constitutional Court refused to approve the measure after word leaked that a number of party officials, who had testified in favor of the ban, were actually paid police informants and could have been influencing the NPD's extremist policies. The publicity may have been good for the party. In September's election in the western state of Saarland, it won 4% of the vote, heralding its revival.

The NPD's success in Saxony is partly due to protest voters angry about Schröder's economic reforms, especially plans to reduce unemployment benefits. NPD national chairman Udo Voigt claims there would be no unemployment in Germany if the government spent its money exclusively on Germans, and not on things like welfare payments to immigrants. "We succeeded in crystallizing the idea that we should not have a multiethnic society but a German society," he says. That troubling pitch attracted young, disaffected voters who have come of age during the post-reunification slump. Some 20% of first-time voters chose the NPD, according to Hajo Funke, an expert on right-wing extremism at the Free University of Berlin. "The NPD conceals its ideology by presenting itself as socially engaged," Funke says. "But it is definitely a neo-Nazi party."

The NPD is reviled in Germany. When the party's Saxony leader, Holger Apfel, appeared on a nationally televised panel show on the night of the election wearing a brown business suit, politicians from other parties walked off the set. The next day, protesters showed up in Dresden, the state capital, with signs reading nazis out. Even in the east, the party's support may be shallow. Hans-Joachim Maaz, a political commentator in the eastern city of Halle, says it's important to distinguish between hard-core NPD supporters and the people who plumped for them in this election. "The voters have no interest in the nationalist idea," Maaz says. "They used their vote to air their feelings of revenge and disappointment." The CDU is feeling the voters' wrath, too. The party lost almost 16% of its support in Saxony and was down 7.2% in Brandenburg — a blow to CDU chairman Angela Merkel, an easterner and widely expected candidate for Chancellor in 2006. That could mean a reprieve of sorts for the embattled Schröder. Nationally, support for the CDU has slipped from 50% to 42%, while the SPD is up from 23% to 27%, according to the polling firm Emnid. But if parties like the NPD continue to surge, everyone's a loser.

• CHARLES P. WALLACE | Berlin
• Voters in eastern Germany turn from the center to the far right