Ulrich Siegmund is the friendly face of Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt. He speaks slowly, smiles constantly, and repeats his messages with an almost obsessive discipline. He has made moderation in manners one of his best political weapons. And he has, above all, one quality: he is a natural salesman. “I love selling,” he confessed himself in a business magazine.
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According to the first projection by the public broadcaster ZDF, the far-right party obtains 44% of the votes, more than double the 20.8% achieved five years ago, and leaves the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) far behind, which sinks to 18.5%.
Now he sells politics. He sells optimism and Eastern nostalgia. Born after the fall of the Wall, he sells the nostalgia of a country he never got to know and promises to recover: a safe, prosperous, and cohesive Germany, where neighbors helped each other, children could play in the street until nightfall, and people felt part of a community. On the campaign trail, he has traveled Saxony-Anhalt on an old Simson, the small two-stroke motorcycle associated with everyday life in the GDR, now painted blue, the color of AfD.
Before selling politics, he sold products and services and even marketed scent diffusion systems for stores, nursing homes, and other establishments. Including fragrances intended to reduce the “potential for aggression” in public transport. Now the product is much more ambitious: to change not just the atmosphere of a room, but that of an entire country.
A large part of Siegmund’s campaign, 36 years old, has fit on a mobile phone screen. Turned into a TikTok star, he has more than 850,000 followers and his videos have accumulated 28 million views since June. According to a study by the University of Potsdam, he alone accounted for almost two-thirds of the political content views in Saxony-Anhalt analyzed during the campaign. While his Christian Democratic rival Sven Schulze’s videos averaged 5,600 views, Siegmund’s reached 214,000.
Trained as a merchant
It is no coincidence. Siegmund trained as a merchant, worked for years in sales, and studied Business Administration and Economic Psychology via distance learning. From those studies, he took a lesson he now applies precisely to politics: simple messages work when repeated. He also learned that selling is not just about placing a product but about provoking a feeling.
And that is exactly what he does in politics. He calls that idealized past a heile Welt, a wholesome world. It is the exact opposite of the Saxony-Anhalt he depicts in his speeches: insecure, impoverished, and abandoned by those who govern it.
He entered politics early. At 18, he joined the CDU, a membership he now almost presents as a youthful sin. The euro crisis eventually distanced him from the Christian Democrats, and he ended up in AfD when it was still essentially a Eurosceptic party. Since 2016, he has been a regional deputy and since 2022, he has co-led his party’s parliamentary group alongside Oliver Kirchner.
PANDEMIC INFLUENCER
His rise on social media began during the pandemic, when he intensified his opposition to coronavirus restrictions and gained hundreds of thousands of followers. Since then, he has perfected the formula: short phrases, repetition, good humor, and a staging that seeks to erase any distance between politician and voter.
Siegmund is also not the great ideologue of the regional AfD. That role belongs more to leaders like Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, one of the main authors of its program. Others develop the ideology; Siegmund knows how to sell it. His talent lies in wrapping radical positions in everyday language and an appearance of normality.
That normality has limits. Asked in an interview if the Holocaust had been the worst crime in human history, he replied that he could not “claim the right to judge it” because he did not know the whole human story. He also refused to condemn supporters who chanted his surname, “Siegmund,” with the cadence of the Nazi salute “Sieg Heil”.
The content, however, remains that of a formation that regional intelligence services classify as a confirmed far-right organization. The AfD of Saxony-Anhalt demands a “deportation and remigration offensive.” Siegmund, the salesman, puts the face to it.