Angela Merkel has said the rise of the populist anti-refugee party Alternative für Deutschland is a “temporary phenomenon”, days before state elections seen as the biggest electoral test of her third term in office. She said she was sure the AfD would slump in the polls once Germans recognised that the government had the refugee crisis under control.

“Many people have the impression that we haven’t yet solved the problems that this huge refugee movement brings with it,” she told the Berliner Zeitung. “It reminds me somewhat of the euro crisis – after it was evident that Europe had grasped the right measures, support for the AfD sank, and the more we get to grips with the refugee question, the more the support will decrease.”

But that was not the view on the ground at an AfD gathering in Magdeburg, capital of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, on Thursday night. “We’re going to see a huge political earthquake in a few days’ time,” said Jürgen Elsässer, editor of the magazine Compact, often described as the political mouthpiece of the AfD, as he addressed a mix of party faithful and curious onlookers in a red-brick venue close to the city centre. “The AfD is here to stay and together we will stop this country from going to the dogs.”

According to polls, the AfD is expected to secure 18-20% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, putting it more or less on a par with the leftwing Social Democrats (SPD). It’s an extraordinary feat for a party that was polling at about 5% in the autumn, and its rise is seen as part of a backlash against Merkel’s open-door policy that has allowed more than 1.1 million refugees to enter Germany over the past year.

In Rhineland Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg, the two other states going to the polls, the AfD is also expected to make considerable gains.

Elsässer, a former leftist who once worked as an adviser to the leftwing politician Oskar Lafontaine, has since moved dramatically to the right and said he would be voting AfD on Sunday.

Calling Merkel a “criminal chancellor”, he compared her to Richard Shaw, the character in the film The Manchurian Candidate who is manipulated by nanotechnology into becoming a US vice-presidential candidate. “Just like him, Merkel underwent this strange personality change when she decided, of her own accord, to open the gates to refugees in September,” he told the Magdeburg gathering. The audience clapped and laughed; others hammered with their fists on tabletops.

“It’s like we’re living in the final phase of the Third Reich, Merkel’s sitting in the Wolf’s Lair or the Führer bunker,” he said, referring to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s favoured hideouts. “She’s redefining the laws of Germany without consulting anyone.” The audience cheered, some clinking their beer glasses in approval.

An AfD campaign poster in Magdeburg. The slogan reads: ‘It’s enough – Saxony-Anhalt elects AfD.’ Photograph: Geir Moulson/AP

The two-hour gathering touched on a range of issues, from the “hunt” for German women by asylum seekers to theories of racial interbreeding, as well as the AfD’s prediction that by 2020 Germany would be inundated with 10 million Arabs and Africans.

“We’re supposed to be allayed by humanitarian arguments, but it would be better to look after these people where they come from. It would certainly be cheaper,” Elsässer said. “To those who talk of the demographic benefits – when will our children get free access to swimming pools and libraries like the refugees? What’s happened to the idea of ‘love thy neighbour’?”

Although it is the smallest of the three states going to the polls on Sunday, much attention is on Saxony-Anhalt, not least because it is ruled by a coalition of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the SPD, a mirror of the grand coalition that rules in Berlin. Political observers see the regional elections as a test run for federal elections in 18 months’ time.

“No one in Germany has ever been given the chance to vote on Merkel’s refugee policy,” said Frank, a 50-year-old caretaker who, like everyone the Guardian talked to at the Magdeburg event, refused to give his full name. “Even the Greek euro bailout was put to the vote in the Bundestag about six times, but never has anyone, whether MP or voter, been allowed to decide on something that will change Germany beyond recognition. Effectively this is our only chance to vote out the Islamic chancellor.”

Andreas Poggenburg, an independent businessman and the AfD’s key candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, took to the podium to bemoan the state of German politics. “We have no proper opposition to the government, whether to the EU, to energy transition, to the asylum policy. It’s an intolerable situation,” he said. “That’s where the AfD comes in. We want politics to be done by the people for the people.”

AfD supporters and the anti-refugee protest group Pegida – widely viewed as close bedfellows – have been repeatedly blamed for a rise in attacks on refugee accommodation, but Poggenburg said little attention had been paid to attacks on AfD politicians. He blamed opponents of the party for break-ins at both his office and his home and for stealing his dog, which he said was later found run over on a motorway.

People at an anti-immigration rally in Erfurt organised by the AfD party. Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP

The AfD’s sense of victimhood only intensified this week when the party was ordered to leave the centre-right European Conservative and Reformists group in the European parliament, after the AfD MEP Beatrix von Storch said firearms should be used to prevent migrants from entering Germany illegally. Von Storch accused Merkel and Britain’s David Cameron of trying to torpedo the party’s success by jointly plotting to have it expelled.

According to Compact, there have been more than 10,000 attacks on AfD members and sympathisers since 2013. Elsewhere in the magazine, there are articles that repeatedly equate refugees with rapists, depict Germany as a ship sinking under the weight of asylum seekers, and talk of the “last days of the chancellor bunker”, or of “Angie alone at home” to illustrate Merkel’s isolated state domestically and abroad.

It also suggests that Frauke Petry, AfD’s 40-year-old leader, whom it describes as an “Audrey Hepburn lookalike”, would be the far better chancellor and the “real mother” of the nation. Unlike Merkel, who is commonly referred to as Mutti, or Mum, Petry had given birth, an editorial stated. “Not only did she have four [children], she has still managed to maintain her youthfulness.”

Both in the magazine and on the stump, repeated comparisons are made between the AfD’s battle to unseat Merkel and uprisings such as the 1848 revolutionism movement, which was triggered by common disgruntlement over the autocratic political structure, and the 1989 peaceful revolutions that led to the downfall of the communist regime in East Germany.

But mainly the party focuses its energy on expressing its opposition to Merkel. “You know we don’t only stand for Alternative für Deutschland,” said a man in his 60s who refused to give his name, “but ‘Angie fürchte Dich’ (Angie be afraid). We will force her to change course before she destroys Germany.”