Two Thirds of the Attention: How Saxony-Anhalt Happened

Between the first of June and the end of August, political accounts in Saxony-Anhalt collected around 43.4 million views on TikTok. Sixty-four and a half percent of them went to a single account.

On Sunday the party behind that account took 43.8 percent of the vote, more than doubling its 2021 result and recording the strongest far-right performance in any German state election since the war.

I'm German, I teach media and communication studies, and this episode is not about how that feels. It's about how it was built.

The lead candidate did 28 million views in three months, out-performing both his own party's federal parliamentary group and its national co-leader. But the finding that matters comes from research on last year's federal campaign: the visibility was driven mainly by ordinary users rather than party accounts. Which is Katz and Lazarsfeld's two-step flow from 1955, rebuilt at scale, and it explains why suspending an account achieves precisely nothing.

Then Noelle-Neumann, because the best available explanation for Sunday was written in Germany in 1974. The spiral of silence assumed people read the climate of opinion from the room around them. That instrument has been replaced by a personalised feed. And at 43.8 percent in a single state, the spiral inverts: the people managing a fear of isolation are now everybody else.

Also in here: why a parliament writing speeches for vertical video is Postman arriving literally. Why the Brandmauer was never a wall but a seat count, and what a 39 to 39 to 5 parliament does to a doctrine that only works while the excluded party stays small. Why the state's own constitutional protection office classifying this party as right-wing extremist moved nothing at all, and what that says about institutional authority when the audience stops granting it.

And one argument with my own field, about the recurring claim that these messages reach young people who lack background knowledge. Under-24 support tripled in a single federal cycle. If your explanation is that they didn't know enough, you haven't explained anything. You've consoled yourself.

None of this required anybody to be stupid. Most of it was documented in advance, in public, by researchers, in German.