Far right gains in another German state election, weakening Scholz’s grip

Only 2.1 million people were eligible to vote in Sunday’s Brandenburg election, but the election was widely seen as a referendum of Scholz, whose constituency in the federal parliament is in the state. The polling suggests that his party won despite, and not because, of him.

Both he and his government have struggled to recover from historic lows in recent opinion polls following months of infighting and the energy and cost of living crisis, among others, while the far-right AfD has reaped a number of recent election successes. The gravity of Sunday’s state election was also clear in the voter turnout: at 72.9 percent, it was the highest for a state election in Brandenburg since German reunification in 1990.

Finishing in anything but first in Brandenburg — where the SPD has governed since the reunification — would have likely been the final blow to Scholz’s hopes of running for a second term as chancellor.

For the AfD, which is polling second nationally, Sunday’s result marked another night of gains in eastern Germany, less than a month after a historic victory in Thuringia and close second-place finish in neighboring Saxony. The Thuringia election, which the AfD won with 32.8 percent of the vote, was the first time the far right has won a German state election since World War II.

Unlike in Brandenburg, the SPD doesn’t traditionally poll well in the two states, but its single-digit results — of 6.1 percent in Thuringia and 7.3 percent in Saxony — were a blow nonetheless, just months after finishing third behind the center-right Christian Democrats and the AfD in June’s European Parliament elections, which saw several countries tilt to the right.

After the Brandenburg election, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel said the party was “extremely satisfied with the results,” which SPD Woidke described as a “huge alarm signal for all democrats.”

Coalition partners to Scholz’s SPD in the federal government — the Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — failed to make it over the 5 percent threshold required to gain a seat in the state parliament.

Such were the apparent concerns over the negative impact of association with Scholz and federal SPD figures, that the Brandenburg SPD forwent campaign appearances with the chancellor in Scholz’s own backyard. Scholz lives just a stone’s throw away from Brandenburg’s regional state parliament in Potsdam.

“The Brandenburg SPD has always been lucky to be able to rely on strong leaders of its own,” SPD’s Dietmar Woidke, state premier of Brandenburg for 11 years, told Handelsblatt in August.

Half of SPD voters in Brandenburg said they wouldn’t have voted for the Social Democrats were it not by Woidke, according to polls carried out by Infratest Dimap.

The success of the Brandenburg SPD, which made a comeback of around 12 percentage points since earlier this summer, was also, in part, due to voters seeking to prevent the AfD from becoming the strongest party, surveys suggest. According to Infratest Dimap, 75 percent of SPD voters in Brandenburg said they “weren’t convinced” but voted for the SPD to “prevent a strong AfD.”

SPD Secretary General Kevin Kühnert told German broadcaster ZDF that alongside voters who were “simply content” with the Brandenburg SPD, “many also voted for the Brandenburg SPD this time because they didn’t want the state flag to have any blue-brown marks on it” — a reference to colors often associated with the far right and the AfD.

Despite Sunday’s victory for the SPD, questions over whether Scholz is the candidate to lead the SPD to victory in next year’s federal election remain rife in SPD ranks. Several SPD politicians have openly suggested that Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who for months has polled as the country’s most popular politician, would be a more suitable candidate.

Jackson Janes, a resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, said Scholz may be able to ride on the SPD’s Brandenburg victory in the near future — that is, unless one of his coalition partners pulls the plug.

FDP party leader and German Finance Minister Christian Lindner — who in 2017 broke off coalition talks with Angela Merkel’s conservatives and the Greens, saying it was “better to not govern than to govern badly” — on Monday gave the governing parties an ultimatum, demanding that decisions be reached on the issues of migration, economy and the stability of the budget by Dec. 21. Lindner’s exact conditions were not immediately clear, and he did not say what his party would do if the ultimatum was not met.

“I don’t think at this point such a likelihood of changing out [before next year’s federal election] … is likely to happen right now unless something really unforeseeable happens,” said Janes said, citing the example of President Joe Biden pulling out of the 2024 presidential race this summer.

Despite three consecutive successes on its card in eastern Germany, the AfD “doesn’t really know where to go with this success,” said Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. Although the AfD’s strength in numbers will be a major hindrance to coalition building in Brandenburg — and potentially after next year’s federal elections — all other parties have vowed to not cooperate with the far right.

One year ahead of the federal elections, Faas said Germany is faced with a “gripping and open situation.”

“This is all the more true when you consider that we obviously don’t know what kind of thematic environment we will have in the coming year: how the situation in Ukraine will develop, how climate events will play a role or of course other events, such as the terrible ones we experienced in Solingen, for example,” referring to the site of a deadly stabbing in August, which federal prosecutors are investigating as a suspected terrorist attack.