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Saxony, with a population of four million, and Thuringia, with a population of two million, chose the new composition of their state assemblies on Sunday.
According to the final results in Saxony, the Christian Democratic CDU narrowly won over the Alternative for Germany (AfD). She scored points in Thuringia, where she won the elections with a significant margin.
How does Scholz’s government react to the debacle?
The success of the AfD, which civilian counterintelligence in both regions describes as extreme right, does not necessarily mean its share in the new regional governments. Before the elections, other political parties rejected possible cooperation with the AfD and will try to create a “firewall” around the party.
The leaders of the CDU in both countries have already announced their intention to form a coalition without the participation of the AfD. But the negotiations will be complicated, in Thuringia it is impossible to put together a majority coalition without the support of five parties from the post-communist left to the right.
In the Thuringian parliament, the AfD will be able to block the election of important committees or the dissolution of parliament.
State elections in Saxony, final results party%CDU31.9AfD30.6BSW11.8SPD7.3Greens5.1Left4.5 Source: Landeswahlleiter
120 deputies were elected in Saxony and 88 in Thuringia. The voter turnout was a record in both countries. In Saxony, 74.4% and in Thuringia 73.6% of eligible voters voted.
State elections in Thuringia, final results party%AfD32.8CDU23.6BSW15.8Left13.1SPD6.1Greens3.2 Source: Landeswahlleiter
“Voters want the AfD to be involved in governance. (…) We will address the CDU in Saxony and Thuringia,” Alice Weidelová, chairwoman of the AfD at the federal level, responded to the forecasts.
“It is a historic success for us. For the first time, we became the strongest force in regional elections,” she added. According to her, the voters punished the government coalition and played a requiem for it.
What does the failure of governing parties mean?
The main topics of the regional elections were security, migration and peace, or the war in Ukraine. The elections in both countries were held in a situation after the covid-19 pandemic and with the effects of war and the frustration of part of society from Olaf Scholz’s coalition. For three years, it has been formed by the Social Democrats from the SPD, the Greens and the liberals from the FDP.
All three parties lost in Sunday’s elections -, although the forecast of the results in Saxony may be a relief for the SPD and the Greens, as according to pre-election polls they were not at all clear about entering parliament. However, the FDP failed completely in both countries.
However, the overall weak result of the three governing parties will probably have only limited effects on the coalition. The Social Democrats have been weak in Saxony and Thuringia for a long time, and the Greens and the FDP are used to fighting to cross the five percent threshold there.
On the contrary, Sahra Wagenknecht’s new BSW party succeeded. The left-wing and nationalist party split from the Left (Die Linke) at the beginning of this year and managed to establish itself in the regional elections. The BSW based its campaign on opposition to the Scholz government.
Loss of Kretschmer and his partners
Pre-election polls in Saxony could not determine a clear winner of the elections, the CDU and AfD were still alternating in leadership. In the end, the party of the state prime minister Michael Kretschmer won narrowly.
Kretschmer spoke of his joy at the results Sunday night. “We have every reason to celebrate,” he said, according to the MDR website in Dresden. “People here in Saxony believed in us. They did not vote in protest,” he said. According to him, there is a chance to form a stable government led by the CDU.
The prime minister previously ruled out a coalition between the CDU and the AfD, but approached it in rhetoric before the elections. Already during the pandemic, he set a sharp course and then criticized the government in Berlin for its economic and asylum policies and its approach to Russia. With the latter, he often irritated his coalition partners at the provincial level and also his parent party.
Why are Germans leaning towards the AfD?
The theme of the elections in Thuringia, like in Saxony, is security, migration and peace (war in Ukraine). The Saxons elect their state parliament on Sunday in parallel with the Thuringians. List The reports were before the vote on a report in the Saxon Ore Mountains. Even people who are not going to vote for the AfD are impressed by some of the solutions the party offers.
The Saxon CDU competed most with the AfD with its leader Jörg Urban. Compared to other AfD politicians, he seems rather moderate, but according to civilian counterintelligence, he is an occasional spreader of conspiracy theories.
The new player is the aforementioned BSW side of Sahra Wagenknecht. It is she who may end up in a coalition with the CDU in Saxony. However, negotiations can be complicated.
Björn Höcke on stage
In Thuringia, the minority coalition of the Left, the SPD and the Greens has so far ruled. Pre-election polls already indicated that it would not happen again. The Thuringian CDU, like the Saxony government, rejects the AfD government. At the same time, he does not even want to join the coalition with the Left.
However, the new government cannot have a majority without the support of either the Left or the AfD, and difficult negotiations are expected. The “blackberry coalition” of CDU, BSW and SPD would have 44 seats out of 88 in parliament and would have to negotiate tolerance with the Left. Why blackberry? In Germany, coalitions are named according to party colors: the CDU is black, the BSW purple and the SPD red.
According to Thuringian CDU leader Maria Voigt, it is his party, even though it is second, that is the de facto winner of the election. The newspaper Thüringer Allgemeine wrote early Sunday that Voigt wants to negotiate a future coalition with the Social Democrats and the BSW. Voigt does not want to cooperate with the AfD and attributes its result to the unpopularity of the federal government in Berlin.
BSW’s Wagenknecht already spoke about a coalition with the CDU on Sunday evening. She refused cooperation with the AfD.
Profile Björna Höckeho
The Thuringian AfD, led by Björn Höck, achieved its first ever win and a result of over 30 percent. He co-founded the party in the region in 2013 and has remained “loyal” to the federal state until now, as he has never sought a position at the federal level. Despite this, Höcke is a well-known face throughout Germany, and several nationwide protests have already been directed against him.
It pays for a politician who leans towards the extreme right. The Thuringian AfD gradually moved to the edge of the political spectrum.
The Thuringian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, i.e. regional civilian counterintelligence, from 2021 classifies AfD as extreme right-wing and monitors it because of attitudes directed “against human dignity and the principles of the rule of law”.
Why is AfD extreme according to counterintelligence?
- Violation of human dignity
The Thuringian AfD intends to undermine the constitutional principle of the inviolability of human dignity with Islamophobic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes.
- Ethnically homogeneous concept of people
Höcke propagates the “Great Exchange” conspiracy theory that Germans (meaning the Caucasian population of Germany) are to be replaced as the majority population by immigrants. According to civilian counterintelligence, such a theory combines “national-ethnic, revisionist and anti-Semitic attitudes” and goes against the constitution.
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