“Not everything was wonderful, for heaven’s sake,” said Siegmund about the four decades of communist rule, yelling into a mic on stage before the departure of the moped convoy. “But this Simson culture stands for individual freedom of movement. It stands for a time when we stuck together in this country. And that is exactly the time I want back.”
Siegmund drove out in front of the convoy with the broad smile that belies the radical politics of the AfD’s state branch, which has risen in popularity despite the fact that the regional intelligence agency has classified it as an extremist organization aimed at undermining Germany’s “free democratic basic order.” Born in Saxony-Anhalt in 1990, one year after the fall of Berlin Wall, this moment of riding, Siegmund said, was all about “freedom.”
The gathering was organized by the AfD ahead of the Sept. 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt, a small largely rural state of some two million people in which the party is leading in polls by a wide margin and may be on the verge of gaining real governing power for the first time since its founding in 2013 as an anti-euro party.
For AfD leaders, a victory on that scale would be a major breakthrough, giving a party that has been ostracized by the political mainstream a governing foothold that would, or so they hope, destigmatize it and allow it to expand with victories across the country. In a subsequent election in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sept. 20, the AfD is also far ahead in polls.
Many of the riders in Quedlinburg shared the diffuse sense of yearning for the past that Siegmund had evoked.
“The people who used to ride these mopeds back in the East Germany days are meeting up here again,” said Martin Krause, a 61-year-old real estate agent wearing an AfD shirt with Siegmund’s face on it. “We want those times back,” he went on. “A bit of freedom, a bit of East Germany, so that we can live again according to the norms and values we knew back then.”