Six AfD candidates have died ahead of municipal elections in Nordrhein-Westfalen. They are very unlikely to have been the victims of a covert assassination campaign.

I had plans to write about something else today, and I even have a half-finished post, but the story of the mysteriously dying AfD candidates is everywhere …

… and I feel compelled to address it.

The West German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen (NRW) is slated to hold municipal elections in just under two weeks, on 14 September. Eighteen million Germans scattered across thirty-one districts and 393 municipalities will elect councillors, board members, mayors and district administrators.

It’s important to understand the scale of these elections and the enormous numbers involved: Tens of thousands are presently running for office in NRW. The exact number isn’t certain, but it may be as great as 90,000. Most of these candidates are totally ordinary people. They are not professional politicians and they are not widely known outside their communities.

Four days ago, the German press began reporting on bureaucratic chaos stirred up by a series of unexpected deaths in late stages of the NRW campaign. Each of these deaths happened so late in the game that ballots had to be reprinted and the postal vote repeated. The German economist and social media personality Stefan Homburg picked up the story and called the deaths “statistically almost impossible.” AfD co-chair Alice Weidel retweeted Homburg’s suspicions, ultimately attracting the attention of Elon Musk.

Despite the widespread interest in this story, I really think it’s a nothingburger. We may be looking at an unusual cluster of AfD deaths in the upcoming elections, but we don’t know enough to say for sure how improbable this cluster is. All we can really say is that the deaths themselves are not unexplained and that their coincidence doesn’t look that improbable on its face.

In all, twelve candidates have died in NRW. Six of these candidates are from the AfD. Three (Ralph Lange, Wolfgang Klinger and René Herford) had serious pre-existing conditions, a fourth (Wolfgang Seitz) also had health issues and died of a heart attack, a fifth (Stefan Berendes) is said only to have died of natural causes, and a sixth (Patrick Tietze) committed suicide. This information comes from the AfD in NRW, and ultimately from the bereaved families of each of these candidates. These are not mere cover stories, in other words.

If we assume – very conservatively – several thousand AfD candidates across NRW, with an average age of around 60, we are looking at an event (six deaths within one party in one month) that is at most a one-in-200 or a one-in-250 anomaly. That is rare, but it is not impossibly rare, and on its own it is not nearly enough to assume nefarious plots. Remember that Germany across all of its states has seen well over 200 municipal election cycles since the founding of the Federal Republic. Naturally, if you assume more AfD candidates or a higher average age, this cluster becomes far less anomalous.

AfD politicians of course face constant petty harassment and discrimination, and they are often the victims of disturbing violence. An organised campaign to take down AfD municipal candidates would however represent an incredible waste of resources. Most of these people wield very little power and at the local level party affiliations matter a little less. City councillors deal largely with pragmatic issues, and in consequence the AfD are not nearly so religiously excluded from municipal government as they are from state and federal government.