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Kloster Veßra: incumbent Wolfgang Möller won against right-wing extremist Tommy Frenck
Photo: Michael Reichel / dpa
Tommy Frenck ran for mayor of the Veßra monastery in the Hildburghausen district – and now clearly lost.
Frenck is listed as a right-wing extremist by the Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Frenck received 29.1 percent of the votes cast, as reported by the State Statistical Office.
His opponent and incumbent, Wolfgang Möller, achieved 70.9 percent of the votes.
Voter turnout in the town was 83.4 percent.
According to the Thuringian constitutional protection report, Frenck has been running the "Goldener Löwe" in Kloster Veßra for years.
This attracts right-wing extremists from Germany and all over Europe.
In 2017, he was also a co-organizer of Germany's largest right-wing music festival to date in Themar, southern Thuringia, with 6,000 visitors.
Frenck's candidacy had provided a topic of conversation in advance.
The Thuringian State Secretary for the Interior, Katharina Schenk, had said that if Frenck were to win the election, the local election law would prohibit him from taking office because he was not acting on the basis of the basic democratic order.
Some candidates received 100 percent of the votes
After the mayoral election in Thuringia, runoff elections are expected to be held in 26 of 325 municipalities in two weeks.
It is still about full-time positions in two places, as announced by the State Office for Statistics.
Around 210,000 Thuringians were eligible to vote;
voter turnout, at around 51 percent, was lower than six years ago when it was around 54 percent.
A number of mayors were elected to office with clear majorities – some even with 100 percent approval.
Two communities were still missing from the count in the evening.
Little can be derived from the elections in terms of party politics: the only party that had a larger share of the candidates with 53 applicants was the CDU.
A total of 41 of the candidates were also elected.
CDU state leader Christian Hirte said: "We are and we will remain the local party in Thuringia."
ani/dpa