The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is backed by 34% of voters in the east German state of Thuringia, far ahead of any other single party, according to a poll released on Wednesday by public broadcaster MDR.
The survey, conducted for the broadcaster by Infratest dimap, comes amid intense political debate in Germany about the rise of the far-right.
The anti-immigration AfD won its first election for district administrator in the state in late June, when Robert Sesselmann was elected in Sonneberg in southern Thuringia.
That was followed on Sunday by a first-time victory in winning a mayor's seat in a small town in the nearby state of Saxony-Anhalt. Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt are two of the six German states that made up the former communist state of East Germany.
The 34% figure is nine percentage points higher than last year, the broadcaster said.
The parties in Thuringia's current state coalition - the hard-left Die Linke party, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens - together have almost the same percentage as the AfD alone, the results show.
Bodo Ramelow, Thuringia's state president from The Left party, warned against stigmatizing the AfD's popularity as an east German phenomenon.
"There is a similar trend in many federal states, in the West and in the East," he told dpa in Erfurt, the capital of the federal state of Thuringia.
Outrage and alarmism would not help - "that does not lead to reflecting what is wrong socially." Ramelow said the AfD in Thuringia showed how the party as a whole was "turning into a modern fascist party."
The far-right party's poll rating should be reason for politicians to think about people's fears and recognize signs of a permanent overburdening of the populace, starting with the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
This also applies to mistakes in "how we communicate politically." The debate on the federal government's heating law, in which many Germans fear having to spend a lot of money to upgrade their heating systems, is just one example of this, he said.
But the state leader also admitted mistakes made by his coalition in the past month. The MDR poll showed that Ramelow's government has a 37% approval rating - the worst figure ever recorded by the pollsters for the Thuringian government coalition.
"I personally take this value very seriously and will also discuss it in the coalition in the next few days," said Ramelow.
He continued that future decisions must be implemented more quickly. The promise that the state would assume the costs for refugee accommodation provided by the municipalities was far too slow, he admitted.
Second place to the AfD's 34% showing in the poll was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with 21%, a 1% decline from last year, while the Left Party, with 20%, is down 2% from last year's survey.
The other parties in the state parliament are also losing ground compared to the last survey. The SPD, the ruling party in the federal coalition, currently has 10%, down one percentage point, while the Greens, who are in the federal coalition, would just manage to enter the state government with 5%, the threshold needed, down two percentage points from last year.
The Free Democratic Party (FDP) the junior federal coalition partner, received 4%, meaning it would no longer be represented in the state parliament, the survey showed.
