If this Sunday at 6 pm the German media publish the first projections of the results of the elections in Brandenburg, for Olaf Scholz it will still be noon. The Chancellor will be more than 6,000 kilometres away from Potsdam, the capital of the federal state that surrounds the cosmopolitan capital Berlin. He will represent Germany at the United Nations Summit on the Future in New York.
The German media are analyzing the situation with a certain sarcasm: New York seems like a good place for Scholz to observe the election from a safe distance. The chancellor has little to gain in the regional elections in which the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is battling with the social democrats of the SPD to be the leading force.
If the AfD wins the election, all eyes will turn again to the weakened and disunited three-party coalition of the SPD, Greens and Liberals led by Scholz as the main cause of the ultras’ advance. If the Social Democratic candidate and current Prime Minister of Brandenburg, Dietmar Woidke, manages to relegate the AfD to second place, the prevailing interpretation will be that Woidke did so precisely because the Chancellor was absent from the election campaign.
New big result for the AfD
The election date in Brandenburg comes twenty days after the AfD’s historic results in the eastern states of Thuringia and Saxony. The far-right won the former on September 1 and was within a few tenths of a win in the latter as well. Brandenburg shares several characteristics with Thuringia and Saxony: all three are states in eastern Germany, all three are relatively sparsely populated regions with little economic weight within Germany, and in all three, the AfD has become a People’s Party or a systemic party with excellent results thanks to a transversal electorate.
According to the latest election poll published last Thursday by the public broadcaster ZDF, the AfD could be the leading force with 28% of the vote, closely followed by the SPD with one point less. The conservative CDU is targeting third parties with around 14%. The conservative and anti-immigration left of Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW, in its German acronym) will enter the regional parliament with a double-digit result, as it has already done in Thuringia and Saxony.
Scholz’s partners in the federal government in Berlin, the Greens and the liberal FDP, will most likely be expelled from parliament, while the left-wing post-communists continue their particular path to extinction, a fate that now seems even more inevitable after the dramatic disruption of the German party system by the party founded last January by its former MP Sahra Wagenknecht. In less than a year, the BSW is already struggling in the polls to become the fourth force nationally.
With this panorama, Scholz will not have much to celebrate from New York. At most, he and his party could cushion the excellent result of the extreme right in Brandenburg with a victory for the social democratic candidate Woidke, which would allow him to remain prime minister at the head of the state government. Otherwise, Woidke has already announced that he will resign from his office, which would add an additional problem to Scholz in the complicated political autumn that is coming for his government.
Woidke currently governs in a tripartite with the CDU and the Greens. If the latter are excluded from parliament, the formation of a government will inevitably require an agreement with the CDU and the BSW, an unnatural but necessary coalition to avoid reaching an agreement with the extreme right. This situation is also occurring in Saxony and Thuringia, states in which there is still no agreement to form new regional governments after the elections.
Political consequences
At this point, Scholz’s government, the worst rated since polls began in the Federal Republic, seems to be holding together only to avoid early elections that would mean further punishment for all three parties. Polls suggest that if federal elections were held in Germany today, the SPD would get about 15 percent of the vote, while the Greens would get 10 percent and the liberal FDP would remain below the 5 percent threshold and outside the Bundestag (federal parliament). Sunday’s elections in Brandenburg will not dispel doubts about Scholz’s “traffic light coalition.” A possible AfD victory would increase them.
Within the FDP, voices are already being heard that are betting on a government exit and are thus trying to get back on track. The chairman of the Liberal Party and Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner speaks of an “autumn of decisions”, a term that opens the door to his party’s departure from the federal government and a possible vote of confidence in the Chancellor of the Bundestag. The chairman of the CDU and already an official candidate for chancellor, the right-wing Friedrich Merz, has declared that he and his party are ready for early elections.
Olaf Scholz continues to say that his goal is to run again as a candidate for chancellor in the federal elections scheduled for September next year. This is despite the terrible popularity figures revealed by the polls: in the current political barometer of public television ZDF, 65% of respondents consider Scholz’s performance to be bad and only 32% consider it good.
A victory for the far right in Sunday’s regional elections would further fuel the debate already underway in the Social Democrats about Scholz’s suitability as chancellor. Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has a much higher citizen rating than him and already appears as an alternative. In Brandenburg, Olaf Scholz has little to gain and much to lose. Part of their political future is at stake in new regional elections that, under normal conditions, would be a mere electoral thermometer.
