Nevim Bayraktar was at a protest about her dilapidated housing last autumn when she encountered an official from Alternative for Germany (AfD). The care worker from the western city of Duisburg did not realise at first that he was from the far-right party.
"He was so kind and friendly," she said. And he was "the only one there who stayed" to talk to her.
Fast forward a year, and the 55-year-old will not only be voting for the AfD but is also running for the party in elections for the local council on Sunday.
The vote for city mayors and councillors in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state, is the first big electoral test for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's ruling coalition that took office in May. It is also likely to help the far-right party to strengthen its footing in the west of Germany, beyond its traditional eastern strongholds.
"NRW is a kind of experimental laboratory," said Kristina Weissenbach, a professor of political science at the University of Duisburg-Essen. "We have many citizens with different income levels and different cultural backgrounds. It kind of mirrors the whole of Germany."
The election is set to cement a rightwing shift in the Ruhr region that was for decades dominated by Social Democrats.
AfD councillor Alexander Schaary, the party official who first befriended Bayraktar and later asked her to become a candidate, said he was "very much convinced" that they would make gains.
The AfD is likely to strengthen at the expense of both Merz's Christian Democrats (CDU) and his centre-left coalition partners (SPD), who voters blame for successive broken promises. But while the CDU could still retain control over many of the state's wealthy cities such as Düsseldorf, the Social Democrats are set for bruising losses to the AfD in places such as Duisburg and its neighbour Gelsenkirchen.
In the post war years, Duisburg was an important coal mining and steel production hub and served as one of the engines of Germany's "economic miracle".
But the closure of mines and steelworks led to a sharp fall in industrial jobs.
"There isn't as much money left," said Guido Kerkhoff, CEO of the steel distributor Klöckner who also heads a project called the Ruhr Initiative. "The inner cities are emptier. It's sad."
Not all of Duisburg is rundown. A port development boasts restaurants and modern apartment blocks with views down the Ruhr river. There are museums dedicated to sculpture and modern art. A former steelworks has been turned into an acclaimed park.
Kerkhoff likes the "honest, direct and unpretentious" local spirit. "You can't put on a big show here," he said.
But swaths of the city, especially its northern parts, suffer from social problems including unemployment, child poverty, poor housing and integration challenges linked to high levels of immigration.
In Marxloh, which about ten years ago was dubbed a "no-go area" by the German press, old sofas and abandoned shopping trolleys are dumped on the pavements. Drug dealers could be seen loitering mid-morning, while a 9-year-old girl wandered around alone, unable to explain why she was not at school.
At a local market, stall owner Muammar Demir complained that his customers try to haggle him down to €3 for a ring priced at €7. "They don't have any purchasing power," he said.
Duisburg's large foreign-born population includes Syrians who began arriving after 2015 when then chancellor Angela Merkel opened the doors to around 1mn asylum seekers. There also are EU citizens from Bulgaria and Romania who often work in tough, low-paid jobs such as cleaning, elderly care and meatpacking.
The newer arrivals sometimes have fraught relations with the second- and third- generation descendants of the Turkish "guest workers" who began arriving in large numbers from the 1960s.
These include Bayraktar, whose father arrived from Turkey in 1961 to work at a Ford plant in nearby Cologne.
Her building in the north Duisburg district of Neumühl has had problems with foreign squatters. She complained about loud parties and said she found human faeces in the basement. "I explained again and again: 'You must be tidy. We live in Germany. There is quiet time that starts at 10pm,'" she said. "They would say: 'Sure, sister, we'll do that.' And then two days later it would all start again."
Organised foreign gangs have been accused by authorities of running welfare fraud schemes and housing scams.
Local NGOs and researchers who work with migrants say that claims of widespread benefit fraud organised by criminal gangs are exaggerated and also risk hindering important efforts to promote integration and inclusion.
But the issues are real enough that SPD mayor Sören Link has been compelled to take a tough public stance. The slogan on his campaign posters is "firm stance, big heart".
As well as the local problems, his party must grapple with its poor image on a national level, and the broader trend of voters abandoning the old established parties.
Out canvassing in the Meiderich district this week, an enthusiastic troop of young SPD candidates encountered several people who said they would vote for the far-left Die Linke. Another slammed a door in their faces, saying they would vote for the AfD.
The AfD is not without its own problems. In North Rhine-Westphalia the party has been wracked by years of infighting, including over the role of a member of parliament from the region who once declared himself "the friendly face" of Nazism. Still, that didn't stop it almost doubling its vote share to close to 27 per cent in northern Duisburg in February's parliamentary election.
One local SPD official expressed dismay at some of the AfD's candidates having "no clue" about local governance and instead spending time "posting cat videos" on social media.
But the party's lack of governing experience does not bother disillusioned SPD voters such as Pascal Leier, a postman and father of two young children.
He is alarmed by what he says is the large numbers of children at his daughter's kindergarten who don't speak German.
He says that the far-right party is untested, but adds: "I want to see what the AfD could actually do if it had power."