The polarization that has plagued European politics has firmly taken hold in Germany, which until recently was a paragon of moderation in public life. It is the first time that a far-right party has won a regional election since World War II, after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) was estimated to have won first place in Sunday’s election in Thuringia.
In Saxony, another eastern German state, the AfD came in a narrow second behind the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). And polls suggest it will win regional elections in Brandenburg later this month.
The European elections last June have already served as a warning to the centre-right CDU: although it won the elections, the far-right made a surprising rise and came in second. This time, the party was excluded from the group of MEPs in the European Parliament Le Pen Because he was considered too extremist (after his candidate’s comments decriminalising the SS), he won in Thuringia with 30% of the vote, and almost tied in Saxony.
The radical version of the left has also surpassed its moderate expression in these regional elections.. The Sahra Wagenknecht League (BSW), with 16% of the vote, overtook the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Thuringia with 12%. And in Saxony, their 12% also exceeded the 8.5% of the Social Democrats.
In fact, the coalition between the SPD, the Greens and the Liberals (which also governs at the federal level) is the big loser of these elections. The Greens were excluded from the chamber in Saxony and almost failed in Thuringia, while the Liberals did not reach the minimum of 5% to obtain representation.
The ruling coalition, which is going through a tense crisis, has obtained the worst results in its history A year before national elections in Germany. What could a dark prelude to a Olaf Scholz in free fall, and a first catapult for the leader of the CDU, Frederic Merz.
The leadership of one of the last strong social democratic leaders in Europe has been punished. The SPD has been overwhelmed by a xenophobic and pro-left extremePoutine and anti-immigration.
Today’s Germany, which always seems on the brink of recession, is losing its image of solvency, strength and unity.The myth of the German locomotive, the economic engine of Europe, is suffering from the scars left by the succession of refugee crises, the pandemic and the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.
These regional elections also highlighted the territorial fractures that survived the reunification of 1990, whose process of cohesion seems to be undergoing a reversal.
It is not just that half of the votes in Thuringia and Saxony are concentrated in two extremist and populist parties. The AfD and BSW are doing well in the five regions equivalent to the former German Democratic Republic, with the AfD triple the votes it gets in the west.
Although the leaders of these parties exploit the feeling of discontent in this area in the process of deindustrialization, the truth is that its economic data are not worse than those of the West. The explanation for its rise must rather be sought in the survival of a political culture in the former communist zone where democratic parties were not as well established. And so it seems more receptive to autocratic leaders, anti-political rhetoric and demagoguery.
Moreover, these states, bled dry by demographic decline and the decline of their cities, offer good breeding ground for the proliferation of xenophobic and Islamophobic discourse. The Thuringian leader of the AfD, propagator of the theory of the great replacement and other conspiracy theories about the pandemic, was convicted for using Nazi slogans at his rallies. And his party, appealing to the knife attacks carried out in recent months by immigrants in Germany, proposes to expel two million people from the country and suspend all reception for at least five years.
At least Thuringia, the same state where the Nazis established a regional government in 1930, does not seem doomed to the same fate. All the other parties have pledged to maintain the “firewall” against the far right, making their chances of forming a government very remote.
In France, it has been proven that the cordon sanitaire of democratic forces against the extremes can work, but it is not enough to stop the underlying trends that explain its growth. That the traditional parties know that the issue of immigration will be decisive is proven by the fact that not only the CDU, but also Scholz himself have recently changed their approach to the phenomenon, proposing to toughen the reception conditions. The contours of the future European policy began to take shape this Sunday in East Germany.
