The elections-barometer in Saxony and Thuringiawhere the extreme right leads and its leftist Alliance also scores impressive percentages Sarah Wagenknecht (BSW)are expected on September 1 and the parties’ pre-election campaigns are already entering the final stretch.

Business associations and family businesses in Thuringia are appealing to citizens not to vote for either the Alternative for Germany or the Wagenknecht Alliance, which was born out of the party of the Left (Die Linke).

For its entrepreneurs East Germany the more political power anti-business forces gain, the less attractive Thuringia will become to the workforce, a representative of Thuringian family businesses told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

A similar campaign has been launched since July in Saxony, where economic policy is at the top of the stakes for citizens, according to a recent poll by the Insa Institute.

A first reaction, however, already came from the Wagenknecht Alliance and its candidate in Saxony, Sabine Zimmermann, who rejects the criticism saying that her party focuses on both the interests of small and family businesses and the integration of foreign workers into the labor market.

Fierce criticism from economists as well

Criticism of the wider economic program of the Alternative for Germany at the federal level has been exercised recently and leading German institutes, such as the Munich Ifo, with the head of Michael Foust (a well-known economist in Greece during the euro crisis period) to consider that the political success of the AfD at the German and European level may endanger the foundations of the common European economic policy.

In fact, shortly before the European elections in June, he declared that “the dominance of radical parties such as AfD or BSW in the states of eastern Germany casts a heavy shadow on the country’s economic prospects, even if their success remains at the state level. The losses of the Greens and the weaknesses of the Social Democrats will make the federal government’s job even more difficult.”

And renowned German economist Michael Fratcher, in a lecture in May at the Technical University of Cottbus in Brandenburg, where elections are also being held on September 22, called the AfD dangerous for the economy with its anti-European policy.

In this lecture, which had provoked many reactions, he had expressed the opinion that Germany had been “one of the winners of globalization, the EU and open borders that created jobs”. On the other hand, he had said that “those who call for the dissolution of the EU like the AfD and want to restore border controls within the EU as well, are putting jobs at risk. Anyone who demonizes immigrants makes Germany unattractive to skilled labor from abroad.”