What they never ask us

On 6 September, Saxony-Anhalt votes.

The AfD is polling above 40 per cent there and nationally, around 30. For the first time since 1945, a far-right party could run a German state outright. Ulrich Siegmund, their candidate, is 35. He's been in the Landtag since he was 25.

The TikTok influencer has built an enormous following (707,000 followers) as a sitting politician, and Der Spiegel put him on their cover in August and called him the country's most dangerous man, which he then used as campaign material.

He signed copies of it and used it as a poster.

That's the campaign. Grievance, filmed well and fear of unknown, with good lighting.

I'm exhausted. I don't know which crisis to pay attention to.

Not because I'm surprised. Because I have to keep explaining the same thing, over and over, to people who've decided not to hear it.

Ulrich Siegmund's whole pitch is simple. Deport and remove the immigrants, and the problems disappear. People have better jobs, universal housing, and health.

In Ulrich Siegmund's and his followers' imagination and stories, the housing, the wages, the schools, the trains that don't run on time. All of it, apparently, arrived with immigrants. As if immigrants came from somewhere off the map, the planet. As if the economy was fine until immigrants turned up.

I didn't come from Mars. I came from somewhere with its own weather, its own arguments, its own version of exhausted people trying to make rent.

Here's what nobody asks me. What it's like to read the news about your own life, written by people who've never met you.

What it's like to plan five years ahead and never quite believe the plan.

What it's like to hear "they" on the radio and know they mean you, your street, your kid's school.

I worry about ordinary things. Whether my German is good enough. Whether my qualifications will ever be seen as real ones.

I imagine ordinary things too. A flat with more than one room that gets light. A job that uses what I know. A country that argues about me less than it argues about bin collection.

None of that makes the news. The story that sells is simpler. Us and them; in and out.

A man with a TikTok account and a magazine cover, telling two million people that their trouble has a face, and it isn't his.

It won't end on 6 September, whatever happens.

It'll just be Tuesday again, somewhere else, with someone else's face on the cover.

I still have to go to work in the morning. So do you.

That's the part they leave out.