First: What does the first place of the far-right AfD in Thuringia and the second place in Saxony mean for the local governments?
Based on Sunday’s results, the question is: Will he actually be able to govern? He was unlikely to get more than the 50% required for an absolute majority. Well, it will probably require a coalition of parties. So far, the other parties, such as the CDU (Christian Democrats), have said they will never join a coalition with the AfD either at state or national level. Think of it as a kind of “sanitary blockade”, that is, a political tactic in which parties refuse to work with the party (or parties) they see as threats to the Republic, keeping their dangerous policies at bay.
The AfD certainly falls into this category. But this means that other unlikely “partners”, such as the CDU and the BSW (hardly), may find themselves with the once unthinkable option of cooperation. The seeming impossibility of this scenario may mean we’ll see some interesting political posturing not just in the coming weeks, but in the coming months as Germany begins to look ahead to the 2025 federal election.
Secondly: What worries chancellor Soltz the most?
While state legislatures have limited influence on Germany’s foreign and defense policy, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is concerned about the impact of September’s state elections on the federal government’s energy and green transition goals. The ruling “lighthouse” coalition was largely founded on the dual promise of tackling climate change and economic stagnation, but European Parliament elections in June highlighted the coalition’s slide in ratings. In Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, the AfD has long been in the spotlight. With a population of more than four million, Saxony has more influence in the Federal Council than the other two states, which could mean continuity in national policy debates and less of a headache for Scholz than the AfD.
Brandenburg leads Germany in Renewable Energy per capita, with more solar PV capacity and wind power generation (per capita than any other state in the country). As a party that disputes the notion of human-caused climate change, an AfD victory in Brandenburg and elsewhere could be a spoiler for Berlin’s decarbonisation goals.
Third: Could the outcome of Sunday’s state election affect Soltz’s ability to govern next year?
In the short term, these election results are unlikely to affect his ability to govern, while his unpopular tripartite coalition has nothing to lose. Germany does not have a culture of no-confidence votes or calling early elections in the face of an electoral defeat for the ruling party, like France, for example. None of the three coalition partners currently has a reason to shake the electoral tree!
The liberal FDP would not even enter Parliament if elections were held today. Solz’s Social Democrats would suffer heavy losses. The Greens are the only party that could potentially survive an election defeat, but there is no reason to risk it at this point. So a relatively unstable coalition government will likely continue until we reach the federal election in September 2025.
Quarter: The success of the far-right AfD shows that East and West Germany are… drifting further apart. The first place in small Thuringia and the second place in Saxony underline that Eastern voters are claiming their own political identity. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the late former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt predicted that reunification would finally allow “what belongs together to grow together.” How optimistic this picture sounds 35 years later… The historic results of the recent elections from Thuringia and Saxony paint a picture of a Germany whose eastern and western regions, if anything, have deep differences.
Only in the eastern regions can the AfD claim to have a mandate to form the next government, as its leader in Thuringia, Bjorn Hecke, has claimed. In none of the western states do polls predict that the Far Right will so seriously challenge the established parties of the Center Right and Center Left (as recently as in Saxony). In Brandenburg, the state surrounding the capital Berlin, the AfD is also expected to emerge as the strongest party later this month. As long as the remaining parties manage to shore up the “sanitary cordon” around the Far Right and prevent it from winning a majority, its dreams of seizing power will likely remain mere aspirations.
TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Thursday: Germany’s internal security services classify Hecke’s AfD in Thuringia as far-right. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2017, Hecke claimed that “the big problem is that someone is portraying Hitler as absolutely evil.” A German court found Hecke guilty of knowingly using the phrase “All for Germany” in speeches (a slogan engraved on the daggers of SA soldiers, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party). In 2019, another German court ruled that it would not be libelous to call Hecke a “fascist”. Hecke’s far-right anti-immigrant stance has clearly strengthened since the knife attack at the recent Solingen festival.
Except: However, instead of rejecting the AfD’s arguments, the parliamentary parties are focusing on reinforcing the narrative that also feeds a dangerous element of ultra-nationalist politics. It achieves this by portraying the deportation of rejected asylum seekers as an urgent security measure. Solz responded by stressing the need to curb irregular immigration, announcing tighter border controls and talks on the issue with the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU). In an interview with Der Spiegel, Scholz said: “We can choose who is allowed to come to us and who is not.” Germany’s Greens released a document calling for a “Zeitenwende” (turning point), redefining a term coined to describe Germany’s new military era in a call for deportations and as a means of boosting internal security.
Seventh: AfD’s establishment as a dominant regional force raises serious and troubling questions about Germany’s political identity and how it limits the rise of such forces in the future.
For years, the assumption in Germany was that once the eastern states had “caught up” with the rest of the country economically, their political outlook would align. According to this reasoning, the rise of the AfD is expressed as a protest vote against the continuing inequalities in income, employment and living standards. But economics and demographics only go so far in explaining the outcome of Sunday’s vote. The population of the East is older than that of the West, but demographically it is no longer “bleeding” as it was during the last years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the two decades that followed (1990-2010).
Eighth: Every year since 2017, more people migrate from west to east. Unemployment is higher, but only by a fraction (the real contrast here is between North and South Germany). In the past two years, the economies of the eastern states have been growing faster than those of the west, as global players such as Tesla and Intel have set up factories in the eastern regions. Immigration levels in the eastern regions that went to the polls on Sunday night are among the lowest in the whole of Germany.
According to a survey published by Olaf Solz’s government earlier this year, around 19% of East Germans say they feel left behind. This is twice as much as in the West (8%), but suggests that 80% of the population of the five eastern States do not feel they are missing out. However, a significant number of them voted for a party that, in its branch in Thuringia, has been certified as right-wing extremist. East Germany votes differently than the West precisely because it has already caught up and now claims the right to have its own separate identity.
Ninth: That the AfD is winning in the east because it managed to clearly understand what the Democracy that was formed after 40 years under communist rule entails and remains different from that in the West. This may sound paradoxical, as the GDR was a one-party dictatorship with no free elections and no separation of powers. However, the GDR regime claimed the concept of Democracy for its own purposes, and emphatically. The historical experience of this kind of pseudo-democracy was one explanation for how the AfD was able to mobilize more former non-voters in the east than other parties.
Unlike established centrist parties, the AfD not only held sizeable rallies on the campaign trail, but organized spaziergänge (“walks”) in city centers, designed to provoke Monday’s peaceful protests that accompanied the collapse of the socialist East Germany.
It is the only party in Germany that calls for the president to be elected directly by the people rather than through a federal assembly, and has advocated a Swiss-style direct democracy of regular referendums. “In its election campaigns, the AfD made very effective use of an experience widely shared among East Germans. What is not heard through voting (joining political parties, civic groups or trade unions) can then be achieved by mobilizing the masses for street demonstrations. There is every reason not to trust the AfD’s claims that it simply represents a different democratic tradition. Underneath his story of empowerment lies a deeply fascist and racist strand of thought, which regards Easterners as purer Germans because they resisted multiculturalism and all the ideas that entered West Germany.
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#AfD #send #Germany #turmoil #hot #questions #answers
