Michael Krell

Local Politics of the "Free Saxons"—Strategies and Local Impacts

Supervising Faculty Member: JProf. Dr.-Ing. Marcus Hübscher

Thematic Advisor: PD Dr. habil. Anke Schwarz (University of Halle)

Motivation & Goal

Under the title “Local Politics of the ‘Freie Sachsen’—Strategies and Impacts at the Local Level,” Michael Krell has been pursuing his doctoral degree at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences since 2024. The aim of the study is to gain a deeper understanding of how the “Freie Sachsen”—a radical right-wing party founded in 2021—engages in local politics in Saxon municipalities outside major cities and how this affects local communities. This research interest arose from the rapid rise of the “Freie Sachsen” during the COVID-19 protests, when the party was founded as a new organizational effort by Saxony’s far-right scene, and quickly built one of the largest Telegram channels in Germany within the radical right/conspiracy-ideological scene (150,000 followers) while dominating the street protests in Saxony against COVID-19 policies. The Free Saxons, organized as a new gathering place for neo-Nazi cadres, pursued several novel approaches in their political agitation, making them an interesting subject for spatially oriented research on right-wing extremism. On the one hand, they pursue separatist goals by demanding Saxony’s secession from the Federal Republic of Germany (“Säxit”); on the other hand, they engage in a radicalized form of territorialization by systematically threatening their political opponents and organizing these threats through a consistent interweaving of online and offline worlds. After the party announced in 2023 that it would run across the board in the 2024 Saxon municipal elections (it received approximately 3% of the vote statewide, but up to 20% in some municipalities), it became clear that further academic research was needed to understand how the newly founded party would manage the transition from a social movement actor to a player in local politics. This is precisely where this doctoral project comes in, by examining the party’s strategies and impacts at the local level.

Approach

The doctoral project is structured as a cumulative study that seeks to examine the local politics of the Free Saxons and their impacts in four steps. In the first step, the party’s election campaign was analyzed using discourse analysis by examining the Free Saxons’ official campaign communications on their Telegram channels. Using a scalar approach, patterns of justification for the party’s decision to run in the election were identified, which rearticulate the municipal scale from a far-right perspective. This first step makes it possible to deduce the Free Saxons’ local political strategies and to understand the role that local politics plays for the party. In the second and third steps, by evaluating interviews in three case-study municipalities, local political documents, and the communication of Freie Sachsen, we will examine exactly how Freie Sachsen’s local politics function, how the relationship between localism and regionalism is negotiated, and how feedback flows into the digital sphere. In the final step, a longitudinal study conducted after a second data collection period in the three case study municipalities will examine the effects of local politics on local communities.

Peer-reviewed publications

• Krell, Michael (2025): “Storm the Town Halls with Us.” A scale-sensitive analysis of the arguments used in the 2024 Saxon municipal election campaign by the far-right minor party Freie Sachsen. In: Berichte. Geographie und Landeskunde 98 (1), 26–48. Link

• Krell, Michael; Zschocke, Paul; Ludwig, Nils (2025): Performative Territorialization: On Monday Protests and Neo-Comradeships. In: Terra-R Authors’ Collective: The End of Right-Wing Spaces: On Territorializations of the Radical Right. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 51–78. Link

• Krell, Michael; Nguyễn, Paul (2026): City, Country, Global Conspiracy? A Qualitative Content Analysis of the *Aufgewacht* Magazine Published by the Radical Right-Wing Minor Party Freie Sachsen. In: ZRex – Journal of Research on Right-Wing Extremism 6 (1), 56–73. Link