Eastern Germany’s populist surge was long foretold but, in the end, so strong on Sunday evening that the shock waves were palpable in Berlin. And as polls closed in Saxony and Thuringia, the opening shot was fired on Germany’s next federal election, scheduled for September 2025.
Ashen-faced Social Democrat (SPD) allies of chancellor Olaf Scholz shuttled between television studios, insisting his bickering three-way coalition will serve out its full four-year term. Not all of them believe that, nor do voters.
Another weak showing on September 22nd in Brandenburg, this year’s third eastern state election, could seal the future of the so-called traffic light coalition – and increase demands inside the SPD to dump Scholz.
After three years in coalition with the Greens and liberal Free Democrats, Germany is in recession, budgets are at breaking point and, above all in eastern states, support is crumbling for Ukraine. All three coalition parties in Berlin were punished on Sunday for an immigration system many link to a series of fatal attacks by asylum seekers.
But the state polls result was about more than daily politics: it was a rupture with eastern Germany’s post-unification period. Almost every second voter in Saxony and Thuringia turned against the established western parties that invited themselves into the former east in 1990.
Now nearly a third of voters in Saxony and Thuringia back the country’s most extreme branches of the populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), “great replacement” conspiracy theories and all.
It was in the east that the 11-year-old AfD scored its earliest wins. And it was there on Sunday that it moved beyond its origins as a protest party. Post-election analysis show voters in Saxony and Thuringia trust the AfD most to address the issues most important to them: immigration, security and defending eastern German interests in Berlin.
After a strong showing on Sunday, its likely exclusion from power in both state capitals will allow the AfD nationwide fashion a victim narrative to rally support against the “undemocratic” established parties.
In Thuringia, where it surged nearly 10 points to top the poll, the AfD can influence parliamentary proceedings even from the opposition benches. It can use its one-third majority to block key decisions requiring a two-thirds majority – on appointments to the judiciary or the state intelligence service that has labelled the party “extreme right”.
Those turned off by the AfD at next September’s federal poll have a new alternative to the far right. They can follow eastern voters from Sunday and embrace instead the right-left BSW, an eponymous alliance led by Thuringia-born Sahra Wagenknecht.
Mocked as a black box of pacifist populism by rivals, the BSW didn’t just score double-digit support on its first election outings: it may yet decide who takes office in Dresden and Erfurt.
The reason for that lies in how both new governments are likely to be led by the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). To secure a majority while maintaining its self-imposed taboo on co-operation with the AfD, the CDU will have to drop a decades-old ban on working with the Left Party or the breakaway BSW and its Sphinx-like leader, Sahra Wagenknecht.
After more than three decades in politics, her BSW – with a handful of members, a shoestring staff, a rudimentary party programme and unclear funding – secured a political coup on Sunday.
By sucking up voters from the AfD, the Left and other mainstream parties, it is now the wild card in German federal politics, where polls give it 9 per cent support.
In Saxony and Thuringia it wants more spending on schools, less on migrants and an end to arms deliveries to Ukraine. A year from now, if Wagenknecht has her way, these regional demands will be national.
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