For eight decades since World War II, members of neo-Nazi parties have never been directly elected mayor of any town in Germany, amid a postwar effort to shape its national identity around a rejection of the Nazi era.<\/p>\n
On Sunday in a small town in eastern Germany, local residents are closer than ever to breaking with that consensus.<\/p>\n
The front-runner in the mayoral election in the town, Aue-Bad Schlema, represents a fringe far-right party that Germany\u2019s domestic intelligence agency has deemed an extremist group that poses a threat to the Constitution. The candidate, Stefan Hartung, says he is not a neo-Nazi, but acknowledges that he is also still a member of a larger party that Germany\u2019s highest court has ruled<\/a> is \u201csimilar in nature to National Socialism,\u201d a formal term for Nazism.<\/p>\n Though just 19,000 residents live in the town, Mr. Hartung\u2019s victory in the first round of voting in May has set off tremors across the country.<\/p>\n Whether he wins or loses the second round on Sunday, his presence in the runoff caps a growing realization in Germany that voting for the far right, even within living memory of Adolf Hitler, is no longer considered taboo. Germany\u2019s biggest far-right party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, is leading national polls and is projected to win two state elections in the fall.<\/p>\n \u201cIt represents a historic break, the likes of which we have not seen since the federal government was established\u201d in 1949, said Benjamin H\u00f6hne, a political scientist in Chemnitz, a nearby city, who studies the far right.<\/p>\n \u201cThe deterrent effect of National Socialism no longer seems to matter,\u201d Mr. H\u00f6hne added, \u201cat least not among certain segments of the population.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Hartung represents the Free Saxons, a tiny party that wants the state of Saxony to secede from Germany so as to more easily deport migrants. According to the German domestic intelligence agency<\/a>, it is \u201cled almost exclusively by well-known, longstanding representatives of the right-wing extremist scene.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, Mr. Hartung was also a councilman for the National Democratic Party<\/a>, or N.P.D. \u2014 a neo-Nazi group now known as the Homeland that the German domestic intelligence agency has said<\/a> \u201chas an antisemitic tradition reaching back to its origins.\u201d The party is considered so extreme that the AfD, which is itself designated as a \u201csuspected extremist\u201d group<\/a> by German intelligence, refuses membership to people who are also members of the Homeland.<\/p>\n In an interview, Mr. Hartung confirmed that he remained a member of the Homeland but said he did not consider himself a neo-Nazi or an extremist, dismissing that classification as politically motivated. \u201cNobody asked me if I wanted to be a far-right extremist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n By his account, residents support him because they believe he knows what he\u2019s doing. \u201cThey know that I\u2019m up to the job,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Although N.P.D. politicians were elected to statehouses in the past, they have always toiled in the fringes of politics in Germany. In 2017, the highest German court rejected a petition<\/a> to ban the party because it concluded the party was too unpopular to damage German democracy, even if it tried. Two years later, an N.P.D. member was briefly appointed<\/a> to run a small village after no other candidates came forward, but the decision was quickly reversed amid a national outcry.<\/p>\n