As the German election results land, a lot of people are looking on the bright side: nearly 80% of Germans won’t entertain voting for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). A nanosecond ago, however – as recently as Saturday – the idea that voters might go this far-right, in these kinds of numbers, for the first time since the second world war was terrifying. Some are calling this a victory over Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who vocally supported the AfD; others are calling it a victory for them.
Nobody is puzzling much over the decline in support for Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party – down 9%, almost equal to the AfD’s gains, although the numbers on switchers have yet to be crunched – because it was so long expected. The CDU/CSU alliance has won, with 28.5%, pretty much as the polls predicted. It’s an incredibly German story in its labyrinthine and laborious coalition possibilities, but it’s also a common story these days. The two main parties hand power to one another in a kind of disillusionment relay; the populist right gets a dispiritingly good show; the populist or eco left is less populist, less popular, and can pick a fight with itself in a paper bag, so it looks even smaller than it is.
In all similar democracies, left and right are having versions of the same argument: does “electable” mean centrist or radical? Will voters return to a late-20th-century happy place and choose obediently between varieties of status-quo-ism? Or has the reckoning with the status quo – that it’s not static, but keeps getting worse – begun?
It’s annoying how much faster the right got its act together. It chose its enemies and animated them with such vivacity and certitude that all there is left to divide it is who hates those enemies most.
The left, meanwhile, is still at its most passionate hating other people on the left and still at its liveliest finding nuance and idiosyncrasy in each new election. But it would be helpful to acknowledge that this is the story of everywhere.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
