OBERHAVEL, Germany — A battle royale in Berlin’s periphery could determine the course of Germany's increasingly fragmented politics.

A regional vote on Sunday in Brandenburg — a forested, lake-filled state of 2.5 million encircling Berlin — offers a microcosm of Germany’s splintered party system, where the post-reunification dynamics of two parties ruling the political landscape are fast disappearing.

The party with the most at stake is the center-left Social Democrats — Angela Merkel’s junior coalition partner in the national government, which has dominated regional politics in Brandenburg for nearly 30 years. A poor result for the SPD — as many polls predict — could create further cracks in the party's already fragile pact with Merkel's conservatives in Berlin. It also falls on the same day that voters head to the polls in neighboring Saxony, though there the conservatives are projected to maintain power.

“Brandenburg is an open contest,” said Thorsten Faas, a professor of politics at the Free University in Berlin, adding that politics in the former East Germany, where Brandenburg is located, has long been more volatile than in the old west.

The challengers to the two traditional parties come from the right and the left. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that only entered regional politics in 2014, is now polling neck and neck with the SPD at around 20 percent. Meanwhile, the Greens, a previously marginal force in the east, will likely double their vote tally on polling day to the mid-teens.

In a recent campaign event in Oranienburg, AfD politicians rallied supporters by complaining of political elites who aren't listening to voters.

Both have demolished the SPD's once unassailable lead, with Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the far-left Die Linke also within 7 percentage points in voter surveys, though both parties have lost support over the last five-year term.

The projected result is in stark contrast to the outcome in 2014, in which the SPD romped to victory with 32 percent, with the CDU trailing at 23 percent — nearly double the AfD's vote share at the time. Back then, the Greens won just 6 percent.

The close race ahead of Sunday's vote makes a mockery of the SPD's campaign slogan: "One Brandenburg," referring to a united federal state.

It also reflects the shifting dynamics at the national level, where the centrist parties — especially the SPD — continue to struggle in opinion polls, competing with steady support for the AfD and a huge surge in backing for the Greens since the 2017 general election.

"The decline of established parties and the need for coalition models are 'old' issues in the east, but have recently also reached the west," Faas said. "In a way, it has been an early indicator for processes that have reached west Germany with some delay."

Brandenburg is where the AfD first entered state parliaments, draining support from the traditional center. Some seven parties could be represented in Brandenburg's 88-seat parliament in Potsdam after Sunday, up from five today.

That could make forming a local coalition difficult, with a whopping four parties possibly needed for a majority. The SPD and Linke likely won't have enough support to govern alone, and forming a coalition with their most suitable allies — the Greens — could prove difficult due to opposing views on coal.

Germany plans to exit coal by 2038, but many of Brandenburg's communities were built around mines and power stations. While the SPD and Linke consider protecting the coal industry to be vital to the region, the Greens are under pressure to maintain their opposition to it.

Mixed priorities

The rise of both the AfD and the Greens in Brandenburg is a product of the competing dynamics within the state. On one hand, commuter communities around Berlin have been dubbed the Speckgürtel — literally fat or bacon belt (those living there tend to be more affluent than inhabitants of the “poor but sexy” capital city).

“Brandenburg has been a Social Democrat state for forever, and now there is a change" — Ska Keller, Greens' leader in the European Parliament

But the state also includes towns struggling to recover from blows to their traditional industries, especially along the Polish border, like Eisenhüttenstadt — a planned Soviet-style settlement built around a steelworks and once named Stalinstadt — and Forst, a struggling former coal-mining hub.



Former East German states in general still lag behind the west in terms of wages and, Merkel aside, few politicians from the region have made it to the upper rungs of power.

It's these feelings of resentment and not being heard in Berlin that the AfD is capitalizing upon.

The AfD is riding on a "frustrated, angry and reactionary" support of around a quarter of voters throughout the region, using themes of inequality "to unleash rage and resentment," according to Hajo Funke, an expert on Germany's far right.

In a recent campaign event in Oranienburg, a town of 45,000 at the northern extremity of Berlin’s commuter S-Bahn train network, AfD politicians rallied supporters by complaining of political elites who aren't listening to voters. Alice Weidel, the AfD’s leader in the Bundestag, raged against extra taxes on expensive flights to Mallorca, the “incomprehensible” import of energy from Central Europe, and the European Central Bank's monetary policy.

"The Greens are in a good state, they have good leadership and consistent arguments" — Hajo Funke, expert on Germany's far right

The response: yelps of "Jawohl" — "that's right" — from a mostly male crowd, while a group of a few hundred anti-AfD protesters chanted slogans across the road. The AfD is betting big on the Brandenburg election. Previous surveys have put the AfD in first place in both Brandenburg and Saxony, where the party secured the most votes during May's European Parliament election.

One party supporter in his 50s clad in a light-blue AfD vest, who declined to give his name, said he supports the party because pensioners and other locals aren't getting enough support from the state — an argument often used by the AfD to condemn Merkel's migration policies. He said cash is instead being funneled to new migrants, and that is fueling discontent.

“We have to make clear to people that if they have a conservative attitude, that they are in good hands with us and not with the CDU,” said Jörg Meuthen, an MEP and co-leader of the AfD from the western state of Baden-Württemberg, backstage in Oranienburg.

But there's still a conservative bloc turned off by the AfD's brand of politics. The party's lead candidate in Brandenburg, Andreas Kalbitz, is affiliated with the Flügel extreme-right movement, known for its flirtation with neo-Nazi tropes.

Oranienburg has long been a bastion of the country’s far right, despite a nearby concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, now turned into a museum complex used to educate about the horrors of the Nazi era. The city still bears the wounds of intense bombing at the end of World War II and its administration maintains a constant search for unexploded munitions which regularly leads to evacuations.

Meuthen is clear the AfD maintains a hard line on immigration and blasts the federal government's policies to promote renewable energy. He describes the Greens as their “main opponents” nationally. He criticized, in particular, the party’s leader in the Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who hails from Thuringia, another former East German state which goes to the polls on October 27, for her open approach to migration.

Farmland politics

Feelings of frustration with the traditional parties are also working in the Greens' favor. While the AfD chips away at the CDU's support among right-leaning voters, the Greens are siphoning off the SPD's voter base in places like Oberhavel, where food production and livestock are important economic sectors.

The Oberhavel district, which includes Oranienburg, is one of the richer slices of Brandenburg, extending north from Berlin's suburbs into rolling farm land. Unemployment trundles along at 5 percent — on par with the national average and 1 percentage point below the state average. Agricultural land covers almost 40 percent of Oberhavel’s territory, split across 38 big farms. It's also just south of Merkel's hometown Templin, and includes the government's palace retreat at Meseberg.

“Brandenburg has been a Social Democrat state for forever, and now there is a change. There’s something happening,” said Ska Keller, the Greens' leader in the European Parliament, on a bench outside a campaign event in Zehdenick, a town of little more than 10,000 some 40 kilometers north of Oranienburg.

She grew up in Guben, in the eastern extremity of Brandenburg at the Polish border among the coal mines of Lusetia before rising through local politics to reach Brussels. Around Guben, the decline in mining has hit local communities hard, with villages wiped off the map. Keller said she gets questions on coal across the state, but that now the Green message is filtering through to agricultural workers alarmed at recent droughts and a spate of forest fires.

"The message is the same everywhere, but when we are debating climate here, we are pushing the drought and forest fires," she said.

In the town hall meeting at an old monastery barn in Zehdenick, Keller takes questions from around 30 locals on how to stimulate organic farming and what to do about lobbying from big corporations in the European Parliament.

Keller said the party has poached votes from the SPD, but anecdotal evidence suggests they are now cleaving support from Linke as well, which has long been popular in the former East German states and governs with the SPD in Brandenburg.

"The Greens are in a good state, they have good leadership and consistent arguments," said Funke, the far-right expert. The question is whether they match the AfD in the east.

Judith Mischke contributed reporting.