German voters head to regional elections on Sunday in a formerly communist eastern state where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is narrowly ahead in the polls.
The anti-immigration AfD has long railed against German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's unpopular coalition government which faces national elections a year from now.
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In the state election in Brandenburg, the AfD hopes to replicate the strong gains it made in the east three weeks ago when it won a parliamentary vote in Thuringia and came a close second in Saxony.
A victory in Brandenburg, which surrounds the capital Berlin, would deliver another knock for Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD). The center-left party has ruled the state ever since Germany's reunification in 1990.
"If the SPD does not come out on top in the elections, it will be a very hard blow for the Social Democrats and Scholz," political scientist Benjamin Hoehne said.
A bruising defeat would mean "the debate about who in the SPD would be the best candidate for chancellor is likely to accelerate," said Hoehne of the Technical University of Chemnitz.
Infighting in the government has seen Scholz's approval ratings take a dive while his defense minister, fellow Social Democrat Boris Pistorius, often tops surveys as Germany's most popular politician.
In the long run-up to national elections in September 2025, the opposition conservatives of the CDU-CSU alliance last week selected their party leader Friedrich Merz as their top candidate.
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Islamist attacks
Some 2.2 million people aged over 16 are eligible to vote in Brandenburg.
The state takes in wealthy towns such as Potsdam, with its Prussian-era Sanssouci Palace, as well as thinly populated rural areas and industrial zones, one of which houses a Tesla plant.
Popular SPD state premier Dietmar Woidke has kept his distance during the campaign from his party colleague Scholz, even though the chancellor's electoral district is Potsdam.
Sixty-two-year-old Woidke, in office for over a decade, has instead thrown down a challenge to voters by declaring that he will quit unless the SPD wins an outright majority.
However, the latest polls give the AfD an edge, predicting it will win with 27-29% of the vote, even as the SPD has recently narrowed the gap and polled at 25-26%.
Even if it wins, the AfD is unlikely to govern because all other parties have ruled out entering into a coalition with them.
But their rise has heaped political pressure on Scholz's SPD and his governing allies, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats.
The decade-old AfD has stoked and capitalized on public fears about irregular migration after a string of recent extremist attacks with suspected Islamist motives.
Germany was especially shocked by a knife rampage that killed three people and wounded eight in the western city of Solingen last month.
Police arrested a Syrian asylum-seeker who allegedly claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group and had evaded a deportation order.
Left-wing kingmaker
A recent survey in Brandenburg found that immigration was the top concern for many voters.
"People are always talking about integration and saying that they are not satisfied with what is happening," one voter, Edeltraud Wendland, 82, told AFP on a Potsdam shopping street.
"Of course, we have to help people, but we can't take in too many of them."
The AfD, besides protesting against migrants, Islam and multiculturalism, also questions climate change and holds pro-Russian positions on the Ukraine war.
This year has seen the emergence of a second populist party, the left-wing Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) which is polling at 13-14 percent in Brandenburg.
Hailing from former East Germany, Wagenknecht is a veteran opposition politician and frequent TV talk show guest who bolted from the hard-left Die Linke party to form her own movement.
She has described the BSW's policies as "leftist-conservative" – a blend of economic policies that help workers and the poor and conservative cultural positions, including limiting immigration.
As in Thuringia and Saxony, Wagenknecht's party could gain a potential kingmaker role after the election – complicating the task for the other parties that oppose her pro-Russia and anti-NATO stance.
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