Thomas Brockmeier, the chamber’s managing director, acknowledged the party’s accurate identification of issues such as deindustrialization but criticized its proposed solutions as inadequate. This critique emerges as the AfD maintains strong polling, consistently around 40%, significantly ahead of the CDU. During a recent party congress, AfD candidate Ulrich Siegmund set a target of achieving ’45 percent plus X’ to secure a governing majority, while state leader Martin Reichardt described the party as a ‘ramrod of the people’.