As the election results trickle in from Thüringen (Thuringia) and Sachsen (Saxony), two things are certain.
One is that the political discourse of the coming few months will be dominated by mudslinging and soul-searching, mixed with desperate attempts to turn the tide (think Marcus Söder’s “Döner-campaign” flooding social media).
The second is that for the first time since WWII, a far-right party won state elections in Germany. Well, in the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a.k.a. GDR. A first. And a first for the AfD, as well, as this was the first time in the history of the party that it defeated the establishment.
Pre-election polls and exit polls were only a couple of percentages off the mark – not a big surprise as Thuringia and Saxony have been long considered the strongholds of the party. In both states, the AfD scored above 30 percent.
In Thuringia, it means the winning position, in Saxony it was enough for the second place behind the CDU, mainly thanks to those conservative voters who decided to vote for the CDU just to keep the AfD from top spot. This translates into 32 (out of the 88 in Erfurt) and 40 (out of the 120 in Dresden) parliamentary seats, respectively.
On the other end of the spectrum, the far-left BSW (Bündniss Sarah Wagenknecht) also gained a lot: in Thuringia, the newest party on the scene gained 16 percent of the vote, while in Saxony, it scored 12 percent, making it also a force to be reckoned with.
Björn Höcke, AfD’s strong leader in Thuringia has already called for coalition talks to begin, emphasizing that it was “a tradition that the strongest party starts coalition talks”.
Yet, the AfD will likely not govern as coalition negotiations are already underway to keep the far-right party quarantined. Behind a “stupid firewall”, as Höcke put it.
This might lead to really “exotic” coalitions, that, on the other hand, might not turn out to be functioning/viable in the long run.
Especially as Friedrich Merz (CDU) has declared way before the elections that his party was not to govern together with “radicals”, and with that he meant not only the AfD, but the parties on the left, too. Unfortunately for him, the list of “alternatives” to the AfD, Die Linke or the BSW are very limited, the more so in Thuringia. There, the CDU needs to decide for “the lesser evil” as there is no way that it can form a government without at least one of those “radicals”.
Either way, the most important message of the elections was the one sent to the governing coalition. A message that repeated and reinforced the results of the June 9 European parliamentary elections.
The Thuringia branch of the SPD hoped for a double-digit result yet ended up with a meagre 6.1 percent – a heavy loss compared to the 23.4 percent they got in 2019.
The Greens and the FDP fared even worse (the Die Grüne won’t have any seats in Thuringia) – though both parties have lost many of their supporters all around the country, in the former GDR their losses are exponentially worse.
In Thuringia, the AfD’s local branch (classified as “definitely right-wing extremist” by the BfV, German domestic intelligence) has twice as many votes as the three parties of Scholz’s traffic-light coalition combined.
The crushing defeat, along with a possible AfD victory in neighbouring Brandenburg in the upcoming elections there, is a clear signal that German, more specifically East-German voters are not happy with the way things are going in the country. If the weekend’s elections were truly a litmus test, they proved one important thing: if things don’t change and don’t change fast, there might be even more “surprises” in the next national election due in a little over a year.
There were voices already after the European parliamentary elections demanding that Scholz stepped down, along with his government that clearly “lost its legitimacy”. These voices will grow stronger.
Björn Höcke has repeatedly expressed the view that things can’t go on as before, “if a significant portion of the electorate refuses to support it in this way, there must be consequences” and that “a clear vote against business as usual, we need changes and there will be only changes with the AfD”.
AfD’s country-level co-chair, Alice Weisel shared his views, calling the results in Thuringia a “historic success” and “a rejection of this coalition and they should ask themselves whether they can continue to govern at all. The question should be raised for new elections. Because it can’t go on like this”.
So far, the SPD has only admitted defeat and declared that “a lot needs to be changed”, but not talking about the possibility of reshuffling of the government, let alone resigning.
In (infamously) moderate and centre-focused Germany, the swing of the pendulum to the two extremes means that voters are demanding change. That the country has a chancellor with worse approval ratings than any other chancellor before, as more than 70 percent of Germans are dissatisfied with his leadership according to a recent poll. His government’s reputation is not much better, with two-thirds of Germans claiming that they are not doing enough to solve the country’s dire problems.
The percentage of votes cast on new(ish) and radical parties means that the existing establishment is not seeing or hearing the voters. Especially when it comes to the anti-immigration sentiment of the population (people who bear most of the burden of the 2014-15 wave) and to the scepticism towards the war in Ukraine and Germany’s role in it.
