“We’re all waiting with bated breath. This is a fateful election,” a friend from Leipzig told me on Sunday. It was polling day in her state of Saxony and in neighbouring Thuringia. The atmosphere was tense, even fearful. Much more was at stake than just a reshuffle of seats in two of Germany’s regional parliaments.
As expected, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won in Thuringia with nearly 33% of the vote, and came second in Saxony with almost 31%. For the first time since the second world war, a far-right party has become a significant political force in Germany.
If there was shock, it wasn’t immediately obvious. Mario Voigt, leader of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in Thuringia, assumed the pose of an election winner, even though his party came second by some margin, with 24% of the vote. He announced he would begin coalition negotiations with other “parties of the democratic centre” – meaning without the AfD. In Saxony, where the CDU won narrowly, their leader, Michael Kretschmer, has also ruled out working with the AfD. In both states, this will require the centre-right party to build complex alliances with two or three leftwing parties.
Even if it’s difficult to justify from a purely democratic point of view, there are good reasons to maintain the Brandmauer (firewall) around the AfD. The party’s chapters in Thuringia and Saxony have been classified as “rightwing extremist” by domestic intelligence. But where is the consternation in the mainstream parties over the loss of trust from vast swathes of the population?
In Thuringia, nearly half of voters opted either for the AfD or for another new party, the pro-Russian Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which stands left on economic issues and right on immigration. In Saxony, the AfD and the BSW achieved about 42% together. In light of these results, building “stable governments without rightwing extremists”, as Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the centre-left Social Democratic party (SPD) has demanded, is a strategy to buy time – but there needs to be a plan to win voters back.
The SPD was all but obliterated in the weekend’s elections, gaining 6 and 7% in Thuringia and Saxony respectively. Scholz called this loss “bitter” but failed to recognise its significance – arguing the “dark predictions about the SPD have not materialised”. Haven’t they? The SPD may have crossed the 5% hurdle needed to move into any German parliament, but as a mainstream political force they are toast if nothing changes. Polls suggest they have slipped behind the AfD nationally.
Disgruntlement with mainstream politics was long treated as a peculiarity of the former East Germany, which included Saxony and Thuringia. The vice-president of the Bundestag, Katrin Göring-Eckardt of the Green party, herself a native Thuringian, was not alone in claiming that some east Germans are “stuck in dictatorship glorification”. Now Göring-Eckardt’s Greens have been kicked out of the Thuringian parliament and are polling at 11% nationally. Telling voters that their concerns aren’t real, it turns out, is not an election-winning strategy.
But easterners are far from anti-democratic. There were lively public debates everywhere in the buildup to the elections. People discussed politics at workplaces and at the kitchen table. Turnout was at a record high, with three-quarters of people casting their vote. East Germans are neither fed up with politics nor with democracy. They are fed up with not being taken seriously.
The same applies to other demographics. A staggering 37% of young voters in Thuringia have voted for AfD. In Saxony it was 31%. Though higher than the national average, this is still in line with what we saw in the European parliamentary elections in June when the AfD beat all three parties of Scholz’s coalition in the 16-24 vote, coming second with 16% – just one percentage point behind the conservatives.
The AfD also won the working-class vote by some margin in the European elections, but this fact gained little media attention and seems to have raised no eyebrows in the other political parties. The working class used to be the SPD’s core base, giving it more than 30% of the vote in every election between the late 1950s and 2005. That this has since plummeted to a historic low is not because east Germans don’t understand democracy.
Ask Germans what their main concerns are. Immigration tops the list, followed by energy prices, war and the economy. The word I heard over and over again in recent months was angst. Given that a growing number of immigrants are being charged with violent crimes, which are on the rise, many feel this is an issue of safety. But this is not just about immigration: people cite a deeper fear for the economic and political future of the country, amplified in the east but prevalent across Germany and the west.
These are uncomfortable topics to discuss, especially for left-leaning parties, but discussing them is exactly what they must do instead of handing a monopoly over those issues to the AfD. That is not the same as plunging into populism. If centrists don’t start a constructive debate on sensitive issues, nobody will. The response to the regional elections must be more than preventing a far-right takeover. This is a belated wake-up call for Germany’s mainstream parties. I hope it will be heard loud and clear in Berlin.
• Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist
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