BAUTZEN, Germany — A thousand revelers waving rainbow flags and bright umbrellas marched through the streets, moving to the pulsing dance music that blasted from a trailer decorated in shimmering golden foil.

On the sidelines, 700 far-right demonstrators dressed in black hurled insults from behind a banner declaring the supremacy of “white, normal and heterosexual.” In unison, they chanted that this was a “Nazi neighborhood.”

Police, with the aid of federal officers and canine units, mostly managed to keep the groups apart at the Aug. 10 gay pride festival here in the eastern state of Saxony. But the sheer number of white nationalists — 10 times the amount at the same event last year — reflected the far right’s gathering strength and boldness in a country with a dark legacy of extremism.

Polls suggest that when Saxony and neighboring Thuringia vote in regional elections Sunday, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) could emerge for the first time as the strongest party in a German state parliament. The breaking of such a psychological barrier would amount to a major new crack in Germany’s post-World War II firewall against the far right, further eroding efforts to contain and ostracize extremist political thought.

These elections, along with a Sept. 22 vote in Brandenburg state, are also being watched for clues they might provide about federal elections due in September 2025 — if Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition can hold on that long.

Observers have registered particular concern that the expanding appeal of the AfD has mirrored a nationwide surge in political violence and hate crimes, ranging from the kind of harassment witnessed in Bautzen to physical assaults that have left German politicians hospitalized.

Last year, political and hate-motivated crimes reached a 22-year high of just over 60,000 incidents, according to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office. German police also recorded 2,378 politically motivated attacks on refugees across the country, the highest number since 2016.

In a country that in recent decades has been a bastion of political civility, the increasingly tense atmosphere is raising alarm, with news outlet Der Spiegel warning of “a whiff of Weimar” — a reference to Nazi violence that percolated in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The far right “has increased in their self-confidence,” said Jonas Loeshau, a member of the Bautzen district assembly and one of the organizers of the gay pride festival. “They are creating an atmosphere of hate and harassment. … We have reached a [tipping] point. If the AfD gets into power [in the state], I will leave.”

The party has adopted a Trumpian attitude toward political violence: distancing itself and denouncing aggressive acts in one breath, while defending aggressors or blaming victims in another. The party also amplifies stories about violence with possible links to left-wing extremists, Islamic extremists or immigrants. An Aug. 23 stabbing that left three dead and eight wounded near Düsseldorf — and for which the Islamic State later asserted responsibly — was immediately seized on as a talking point in the AfD’s election campaigns.

“Germans, Thuringians, do you really want to get used to these conditions? Free yourselves, finally put an end to the misguided path of forced multiculturalism!” the AfD leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, posted on social media even before police had confirmed the identity and motive of the assailant.

Yet statistics show that the most numerous aggressors — representing nearly half of all politically motivated crimes in Germany — hail from the far right.

Critics accuse the AfD of fueling aggression and violence with extremist rhetoric. Although some AfD politicians have been at the receiving end of political violence, the rhetoric of AfD members has sometimes run up against Germany’s strict limits on hate speech.

Thuringia’s Höcke was fined twice this year for using a banned Nazi slogan.

The party’s regional branches in three states, including Saxony and Thuringia, have been classified by regional domestic intelligence agencies as “confirmed extremist” groups based on ethnically tinged anti-migrant positions, Islamophobia and defamation of state institutions and government officials. On a national level, authorities have classified the AfD’s youth wing as “confirmed extremist,” and the main AfD as a “suspected extremist” group.

Those designations allow intelligence surveillance of the party and have led to mounting calls for a ban.

AfD bosses object to the “extremist” labeling. An extremist is someone “who tries to question or fight the free democratic basic order with violence or violent fantasies,” said national co-leader Tino Chrupalla, arguing that his party’s members had not taken such an approach.

The AfD was founded in 2013 as a party that emphasized Euroskepticism and low taxes. But it has sought to maintain relevance by staking out a vocal position on successive hot-button issues. Since the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, the party has been closely associated with hard-line anti-immigration views. AfD politicians regularly showed up at anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown rallies during the pandemic, capitalizing on surging distrust of government. And they have tapped into pro-Russian sympathies in eastern Germany by opposing sanctions on Moscow and objecting to support for Ukraine.

Along the way, the AfD has managed to normalize far-right rhetoric and chip away at societal resistance to far-right politics.

Despite deradicalization efforts after the defeat of the Third Reich, the far right had maintained footholds across both parts of divided Germany. Before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, skinhead culture thrived, especially in the economically depressed eastern states, where street thugs targeted immigrants and others seen as outsiders.

“We’ve always known through surveys that … far-right thought never disappeared in Germany,” said Miro Dittrich, co-managing director of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy. “But in the recent past, they didn’t really have a party they could vote for. They didn’t have a political platform. That’s changed with the AfD.”

The AfD is now the fifth-largest party in the national parliament; it placed second in June’s vote for the European Parliament; and it has won city and regional council seats across Germany.

A further milestone moment could come Sunday in Saxony or Thuringia. The AfD is not expected to win the majority required to govern in either, but it could reach the threshold needed to block certain decisions, such as the appointment of judges and amendments to the state constitution.

A strong first-place finish for the AfD would also spell trouble for Scholz’s “traffic light” coalition — made up of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats, and named for their traditional colors. According to the latest polling figures, all three parties risk failing to meet the 5 percent threshold required to sit in the two state parliaments.

German big business is so alarmed that 40 large companies — including Miele and Oetker — banded together ahead of the elections, launching a media campaign calling on employees and customers to “embrace diversity.” That followed a separate effort by 30 German companies, among them Siemens and Mercedes-Benz, to promote tolerance and reject populism and extremism.

“In 2024, not a single car would roll off the production line without people with a migration heritage,” Mercedes-Benz boss Ola Källenius told the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.

A charged atmosphere, meanwhile, has enveloped the region. On the night of May 3, Matthias Ecke, a 41-year-old politician from the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), was hanging campaign posters in Saxony’s capital of Dresden when he was attacked by four teenagers — one of whom was found to have links to the local far-right scene. Ecke’s injuries, including a broken eye socket and cheekbone, required surgery. Police confirmed that the same group was responsible for a nearby attack against a Greens politician on the same evening.

“I would absolutely say that [the AfD is] the main responsible political force for this radicalization,” Ecke told The Washington Post. “Because what they do is create an atmosphere where people try to take things in their own hands.”

Following the attack on Ecke, the AfD’s leader in Saxony, Jörg Urban, tweeted that assaults on politicians “are always attacks on democracy.”

“However,” he added, “the SPD must ask itself to what extent its constant agitation against political dissidents contributes to such escalations.”

Urban initially agreed to an interview with The Post before canceling and declining to reschedule.

German authorities are still investigating links between far-right extremist groups, including youth groups, and the AfD. But their adherents cross-pollinate one another’s events. On a recent afternoon in Bautzen, for instance, two members of the city’s Youth Block — a radical far-right group that has taken to “patrolling” the city on Monday nights — waited for their friends near an AfD campaign booth.

“I’m pure German,” said one of the teenagers, who refused to give his name citing “distrust” of the media. Dressed in a black T-shirt that read “youth without migration background,” the 19-year-old said he would vote for the AfD on Sunday.

“Foreigners who come here and work are okay,” he said. “But not those who just come here and take state money and commit sexual abuse. The other parties are just bringing more refugees to Germany. That’s not a pure Germany.”

Like many in Europe’s far right, the AfD has adopted a notably pro-Israel stance. But the party’s rising popularity is still fueling anxiety in Saxony’s small Jewish community.

In Dresden, a group of liberal Jews — including Israelis and Americans — opened a synagogue last year inside an old train station once used by the Nazis to send people to concentration camps and ghettos. The synagogue’s members have not taken comfort in AfD claims of being pro-Jewish, and officials say the small congregation has grown increasingly afraid. The synagogue has already requested additional security ahead of a LBGTQ+ wedding scheduled there in October.

“It’s very nice that someone says, I don’t hate Jews because of Germany’s history, but if you hate immigrants, you effectively hate others,” said Moshe Barnett, 27, chair of the liberal Jewish Religious Community of Dresden. “Maybe you will not kill me because of what your grandfather did. But basically, you don’t want me.”