Germany’s hard-right AfD wins a state poll—but won’t be in power
AS THE POLLS closed in two keenly watched German state elections on September 1st, projections showed the hard right set to have notched up a first. With the details still to unfold as the full vote was counted, the story of the evening seemed clear: in Thuringia the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a hard-right party whose branches in both that state and Saxony, which also voted on September 1st, have been formally designated as extremist, appears to have topped the polls in a state election for the first time since its founding just over a decade ago. In Saxony it is projected to sit only fractionally behind the mainstream Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The AfD’s lead candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, whose provocative flirtations with Nazi rhetoric have landed him with criminal convictions, is not about to take charge of the state. No other party will work with the AfD, in the east or anywhere else (although if it secures one-third of the seats in Thuringia, as looks likely, the party would have a blocking minority in parliament, enabling it to block the appointment of judges among other matters). But the large chunk of seats the AfD now occupies looks likely to force the other parties into ideologically garbled coalitions to keep it from power.
That is where the role of a second populist party could prove crucial. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a “left-conservative” outfit launched in January by Ms Wagenknecht, an east German ex-communist who broke from a hard-left party, seems to have secured a double-digit, third-place result in both states. The BSW’s sceptical positions on immigration and on Germany’s support for Ukraine can sometimes be hard to distinguish from those of the AfD. But it is too new to sit on the wrong side of a cordon sanitaire, and the projected results in both Saxony and Thuringia suggest that it will be in a strong position to join the CDU in government in both states.
That prospect will turn the stomach of CDU leaders in Berlin and across west Germany. Worse, to make up the numbers, the CDU and BSW may also need the help of a third party: the Social Democrats (SPD), who lead Germany’s national government, to which the CDU is in opposition. The SPD’s results in both states were dismal—as were those of its national coalition partners, the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats—if slightly better than expected. Olaf Scholz, the SPD chancellor, is detested across the states that voted: only 17% of voters in Saxony and Thuringia say he is doing a good job. Yet such are the requirements of Germany’s increasingly fragmented party system that the SPD may remain indispensable for the formation of stable governments.
The symbolic nature of the results will resonate more than their substance. It is true that over 40% of voters in both states plumped for populist parties that sometimes sound like Kremlin mouthpieces. But German states have little power to shape the country’s foreign policy. Nor can election results in two small states whose combined population of 6.2m represents about 7% of the German total be taken as any sort of national bellwether.
Yet Michael Kretschmer, the CDU premier in Saxony, was not wrong to say before the vote that his state was confronting a Schicksalwahl, or “fateful election”. The AfD has morphed from a group of grouchy Eurosceptics to a party whose more radical members, such as Mr Höcke, sometimes operate at the margins of democracy; some in Germany reckon the party should be banned. Its exploitation of grievances over inflation, immigration and Ukraine has found substantial backing not only in east Germany but across the country: the AfD has long occupied second spot in national polls, behind the CDU plus its Bavarian sister party, but ahead of all three parties of Germany’s national coalition.
While the country chews over the consequences of the state elections, politicians in Saxony and Thuringia will now begin the painstaking work of negotiating coalitions—something that takes several weeks even at the best of times. Mr Kretschmer in particular may face what Germans call “a choice between the plague and cholera”: maintaining his unpopular coalition with the SPD and the Greens, or kicking out the Greens for the (larger and trickier) BSW. In Thuringia, meanwhile, Mario Voigt, the CDU’s main candidate, may have no choice but to go with both the SPD and BSW.
Yet Ms Wagenknecht has made it clear that she will be no pushover in coalition talks. Before the elections she said that her BSW would only join parties in government that were committed to rejecting Mr Scholz’s recently agreed plan to station long-range American missiles in Germany from 2026. That may seem like a hubristic demand to make of a government that should be occupied with housing, education and policing. But it is a reflection of the uncharted territory into which German politics appears to be heading. ■