Saxony's Prime Minister Kretschmer attacks AfD ahead of state elections

Three weeks before the state elections in Saxony and Thuringia, Saxony's CDU Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer has sharply attacked the AfD - in particular its leading candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke. "Björn Höcke is a neo-Nazi: from his entire choice of words, from the topics, from the way he behaves," Kretschmer told Bild am Sonntag.

After Höcke's appearances in Saxony, Kretschmer also attested to the AfD's increasingly radical stance in his federal state: "The fact that someone like this is campaigning here and being welcomed shows that the AfD leadership here is heading in exactly the same direction."

At the same time, he qualified that not all AfD voters and members are right-wing extremists. "That's stupid stuff. There are very, very many people who have lost this trust in the institutions." In Thuringia and Saxony, the AfD is classified by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution as definitely right-wing extremist.

CDU man Kretschmer wants to be re-elected as Minister President in the state elections in Saxony on September 1. According to the latest ZDF political barometer, the AfD is still clearly in first place in Thuringia with 30 percent. In Saxony, however, Kretschmer's CDU is in the lead with 34%. As a general rule, polls only reflect opinion at the time of the survey and are not a forecast of the election outcome.