Doctoral project Michael Krell
Motivation & goal
Michael Krell has been working on his doctorate at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences since 2024 under the title "Local Politics of the "Free Saxons" - Strategies and Effects at the Local Level". The aim of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of how the Free Saxons, a radical right-wing party that emerged in 2021, conduct local politics in Saxon municipalities outside the major cities and how this affects local societies. This research interest arose from the comet-like rise of the Free Saxons in the wake of the Corona protests, when the party was founded as a new attempt to organize the radical right-wing scene in Saxony, and quickly built up one of Germany's largest Telegram channels of the radical right/conspiracy ideology scene (150,000 followers) and dominated the Saxon street protests against Corona politics. The Free Saxons, which are organized as a new rallying point for neo-Nazi cadres, pursued several novel paths in their political agitation that make them interesting as an object of study for spatial research into right-wing extremism. On the one hand, they focus on separatist efforts by calling for Saxony to leave the Federal Republic ("Säxit"); on the other hand, they engage in a radicalized form of territorialization practices by systematically threatening their political opponents and organizing them through a consistent interweaving of online and offline worlds. After the party announced in 2023 that it would contest the 2024 local elections in Saxony (they achieved around 3% of the vote across Saxony, but up to 20% in some municipalities), it became clear that further scientific research was needed to understand how the newly founded party would organize the switch from movement actor to local political player. This is precisely where the doctoral project comes in by investigating the strategies and effects of the party at the local level.
Procedure
The doctoral project is structured as a cumulative doctorate, which attempts to take a closer look at the local politics of the Free Saxons and its effects in four steps. In the first step, the party's election campaign was examined discourse-analytically by analyzing the official election campaign communication of the Free Saxons in their Telegram channels. A scalar approach was used to identify patterns of justification for the party's election campaign that rearticulate the communal scale from a radical right-wing perspective. This first step makes it possible to derive the strategies of the Free Saxons' local political strategies and to understand what role local politics plays for the party. In the second and third steps, the analysis of interviews in three case study municipalities, municipal policy documents and the communication of the Free Saxons will be used to investigate how exactly the local politics of the Free Saxons works, how the relationship between localism and regionalism is negotiated and how the feedback into the digital space takes place. In the final step, a longitudinal study after a second survey period in the three case study municipalities will be used to investigate the effects of local politics on local societies.
Reviewed publications
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Krell, Michael (2025): "Storm the town halls with us". A scale-sensitive argumentation analysis of the Saxon local election campaign of the radical right-wing micro-party Free Saxony in 2024. In: Berichte. Geography and Regional Studies 98 (1), 26-48. link
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Krell, Michael; Zschocke, Paul; Ludwig, Nils (2025): Performative territorialization: of Monday protests and neo-comradeships. In: Autor*innenkollektiv Terra-R: Das Ende rechter Räume: Zu Territorialisierungen der radikalen Rechten. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 51-78. link
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Krell, Michael; Nguyễn, Paul (accepted): Stadt, Land, Weltverschwörung? A qualitative content analysis of the Aufgewacht magazine of the radical right-wing micro-party Freie Sachsen. In: ZRex - Journal for Research on Right-Wing Extremism 6 (1).
