The narrow victory of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Brandenburg regional elections last Sunday promised a lifeline for Olaf Scholz. The SPD managed to overturn the polls and ultimately push the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) into second place, thanks in part to its candidate and federal state premier, Dietmar Woidke. One could say that Woidke won despite his party and Chancellor Scholz, who was absent during the campaign and has a terrible public opinion.
The oxygen tank that promised results in Brandenburg now threatens to become a rope that could end up suffocating the “traffic light coalition” led by Scholz in the federal government. The debacle suffered by the two partners of the Social Democratic Chancellor foreshadows storms in the political autumn that has just begun.
The eco-liberal Greens have fallen below the 5% mark (4.1% to be exact) and are leaving the regional parliament. The situation is more serious for the liberal FDP, which did not reach 1% of the vote and is not even listed as a failure in the final election results. The junior partner of the Berlin three-party coalition has been buried in the percentage bar dedicated to the “other parties”, minor and unimportant.
“Autumn of decisions”
The FDP’s electoral snub could soon have consequences for German national politics. The chairman of the liberals and federal finance minister, Christian Lindner, has given his government partners until next Christmas to resolve the two main issues on which his party officially has differences with the Social Democrats and the Greens: the federal budget for 2025 and the immigration problem. If no consensus is reached, Lindner announces “an autumn of decisions”.
FDP deputy chairman Wolfgang Kubicki put it less diplomatically: “Either we manage to find common ground in the coming weeks, or it makes no sense for the liberals to continue in this coalition,” he said in an interview with the news channel Welt TV. . Conservative newspaper television The world.
Kubicki says openly what has been the subject of speculation for weeks in Germany: that the dissolution of Scholz’s coalition government is on the table and that neither a motion of confidence in the Bundestag against the chancellor nor an advance of the federal elections scheduled for September 2025 can now be thrown away.
The Scholz government is being shaken by its weakest leg, that of the liberals, who would most likely remain below the 5% threshold if parliamentary elections were held today and thus outside the Bundestag. The FDP’s calculation seems to be that a departure from the government with the worst citizen rating in the history of the Federal Republic could be the last card to come back in the polls. The victory of Woidke’s Social Democrats in Brandenburg would thus become a Pyrrhic victory for Scholz.
The strength of the AfD
The context of this serious internal crisis of the German government is above all the strength of the AfD, a far-right party. The victory of the SPD by just over one point (30.9%) compared to the ultras (29.2%) does not hide an increasingly uncomfortable reality for the rest of the parties: the far right continues to progress with each opening of the polls in Germany. In Brandenburg, the AfD is the party whose representation in the regional parliament has increased the most compared to the last elections in 2019. The victory of the Social Democrats has cushioned the progress of the far right more than it has stopped it.
German analysts and media traditionally consider the country’s political center to be composed of the conservative CDU-CSU union, the social democrats SPD, the Greens and the Liberals. The CDU lost more than 3 points on Sunday, while the Greens and the Liberals are becoming extra-parliamentary forces in the state surrounding Berlin.
Meanwhile, the young conservative and anti-immigration left founded last January by the former left-wing representative Sahra Wagenknecht continues its meteoric rise. On Sunday, the BSW won 13.5% of the vote and will be the third parliamentary faction in Brandenburg ahead of the CDU. The BSW is literally causing an earthquake in the German political party system, which is historically stable and unlikely to change abruptly.
Germany and its government, weighed down by a stagnant economy and a crisis in its industrial model, are seeing their political center erode in favor of positions located to the right and left of the traditional parties. One fact is particularly worrying for the future of the country: as happened in the European elections last June, on Sunday in Brandenburg, the far-right AfD was again the first choice among voters under 30.
