'Will We Be Free?' Magdeburg Theater Chief Warns of AfD Threat to Artistic Freedom Ahead of Sept. 6 Vote

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Video: VERTEX (YouTube), published Aug. 20, 2026 · 4:09 · Reuters footage, Magdeburg, Germany, Aug. 20, 2026

Summary

Julien Chavaz, general director of Theater Magdeburg, warns in this VERTEX segment that a far-right election victory in Saxony-Anhalt could end artistic freedom at Germany’s publicly funded theaters. Speaking from a rehearsal at his theater, Chavaz says the question hanging over the company is whether “we will be free to do our theater” if the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, wins a governing majority in the state’s Sept. 6 election.

Chavaz calls the AfD’s cultural agenda a paradox. The party campaigns on protecting German values and heritage, he says, yet Germany’s theater tradition — “a theater in every city” — is among the country’s most prestigious cultural inheritances, and attacking it is “anti-German.” He objects to AfD proposals that would require cultural institutions to sign what he calls “kind of a confession” as a condition of public funding; the video notes the party has proposed tying funding to declarations that artists and institutions do not mock Germany or its culture. A free theater, Chavaz says, “is not here to put on the stage the ideology of the majority in the government,” but must be “a counterpower” — a place for criticism, discussion and new perspectives — and a pillar of democracy. He also invokes the December 2024 attack on Magdeburg’s Christmas market, which killed six people, as part of the city’s recent trauma.

Dancers at the theater voice a second fear: flight of talent. If “the right extremists come to power” and dictate what kind of art can be made in the region, one company member says, “a lot of artists will not come here.”

Background

The pledge Chavaz describes is not hypothetical. On June 25, 2026, the AfD introduced a motion in the Saxony-Anhalt Landtag to make state culture funding conditional on a prior “commitment to state, democracy and German culture” (motion text). Every other party voted it down, with CDU lawmaker Jan Riedel calling it “manifestly unconstitutional,” according to the Landtag’s account of the debate. AfD culture spokesman Hans-Thomas Tillschneider has said culture is “first and foremost what provides national identity,” per ZDFheute.

The stakes are set by the polls. The AfD leads Saxony-Anhalt surveys at 41%, roughly 15 points ahead of the CDU, with lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund seeking to become Germany’s first far-right state premier since World War II (Infratest dimap via IamExpat; CSIS). All other major parties except BSW maintain the “firewall” against governing with the AfD, so the party would likely need an absolute majority of seats to take power. State premiers control culture budgets; German theaters depend overwhelmingly on public subsidy, a dependence the sector itself underlined in this year’s funding fight.

The party’s legal status sharpens the conflict. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization on May 2, 2025 (NPR), but the Cologne administrative court suspended that designation on Feb. 26, 2026, pending the main proceedings; the party remains under observation as a suspected extremist group (Courthouse News).

Saxony-Anhalt’s cultural sector has mobilized. More than 60 institutions and associations — including Theater Magdeburg, the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau and the Moritzburg museum in Halle — signed a joint statement in April 2026 rejecting loyalty tests for art, and the outgoing government has enacted a cultural protection law meant to insulate arts funding from political interference, per ZDFheute. The pressure is not unique to Germany: the European Theatre Convention has documented far-right attempts to fire staff and nationalize repertoires at publicly funded theaters in Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and Slovakia (Euronews).

Chavaz, a Swiss-born opera director, has led Theater Magdeburg since 2022; the house was named Germany’s Theater of the Year for 2025. Quotes above are taken from the video’s audio.

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