Critical time for Europe A journey through Germany as voters head for the polls

A journey through Germany as voters head for the polls

- Kate Connolly

Breaking, overcrowded, neglected, Germany's railways, once a source of national pride, have taken a battering to their image in recent years. Amid wider concerns about the health of Europe's stuttering largest economy, the state of its trains has become something of a metaphor for a more general sense of malaise.

Now as Germany stands on the brink of one of the most important elections in recent times, with an emboldened far right hoping to more than double its share of votes, the Guardian has travelled more than 850 miles on trains across Germany to hear what its citizens have to say about the state of their nation.

In conversations with more than 50 people on platforms and in carriages across five cities and over six days, we heard their hopes, fears and aspirations. Some warned of an increasing polarisation in Germany, of worries that a country that has spent decades undoing the evils of nazism could be heading back to the populist far right. Others complained about bureaucracy, about energy costs - and about the trains.

Magdeburg: 'It feels like we've lost our way'

In this city south-west of Berlin, an erstwhile baroque jewel that was heavily bombed in the second world war, a cold winter mist hangs in the morning air and an accordion player in a trilby squeezes out the notes to the theme tune of The Godfather. Polish workers are up ladders in the city centre, dismantling Christmas decorations.

An attack on the Christmas market here in December, in which a 50-year-old doctor from Saudi Arabia drove an SUV into crowds, killing six and injuring nearly 300, thrust Magdeburg into the political debate and prompted calls for tightened security, including more border controls.

In a campaign subsequently dominated by questions of migration and security, key issues for the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland, it proved pivotal.