The German media are writing about a political earthquake or tsunami of anger in response to the result of Sunday’s elections in the East German states of Saxony and Thuringia. In both, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), described as right-wing populist to far-right, won over 30 percent of the vote. She even won in Thuringia. According to the media, the vote was a disaster and a debacle for the parties of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s pan-German government.
02.09.2024 11:30
Photo: SITA/AP, Daniel Vogl
AfD leader in Thuringia Björn Höcke.
“The result of the election must be a warning to all democrats, how it is possible to destabilize the political situation in the long term, when citizens consider what the government decides and does to be fundamentally wrong,” writes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) in a commentary. According to him, voters in Saxony and Thuringia “collectively punished” the parties of the pan-German government coalition, describing the result as a “tsunami of anger”.
The Social Democrats (SPD) achieved single-digit gains in both federal states, while in Thuringia the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) did not make it into parliament at all.
“It was the German-wide issues that gave the AfD enormous support and helped Sahra Wagenknecht’s Alliance (BSW) to take off,” FAZ wrote. The new left-wing formation BSW, which combines left-wing economic policies and immigration-skeptic politics, finished third in both countries. According to FAZ’s comments, Chancellor Scholz should now realize that migration is a key topic of interest to citizens.
Also according to the daily Frankfurter Rundschau (FR), Sunday was “truly a historic day”. “It has backfired on the SPD, the Greens and the FDP that they have only been concerned with themselves in recent months,” FR wrote in a commentary. On Sunday, many government politicians also attributed the failure in the elections to internal disputes in the Berlin coalition. The magazine Der Spiegel described the result of the governing parties in the state elections in Saxony and Thuringia as a “debacle” and a “disaster”.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper comments on the upcoming coalition negotiations, which will be very difficult due to the distribution of forces in the parliaments. According to him, Saxony and Thuringia found themselves on the verge of not being able to govern them stably at all. The website of the news station NTV sees it as well, for example.
The analysis of the Tagesschau news program of the German public television ARD deals with the phenomenon of the AfD party, which dominated the elections – it won in Thuringia, and finished only a close second in Saxony. According to this analysis, it has long been the case that AfD supporters vote out of protest. “However, that has changed. For the first time, people voted for the AfD because they trust it the most to be able to solve their problems,” Tagesschau wrote.
The daily Münchner Merkur even writes about the “counter-revolution” in the East. According to him, after the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where today’s Saxony and Thuringia belonged, “the West German parties took over the east”. But now the situation is turning around. Also, the news website ntv wrote that the parties of Scholz’s government coalition – the SPD, the Greens and the FDP – are a “foreign body” in the east. The key question, according to the Münchner Merkur daily, is whether the conservative CDU/CSU union, which is now in opposition at the German level, can play the role of a stable center and win back conservative voters who have in part switched to the far-right AfD and the new far-left formation BSW. Regular federal elections in Germany are waiting for a year in September.
The first victory of a far-right party since the defeat of Nazism
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) was the first far-right party after the defeat of Nazism in the Second World War to succeed in the parliamentary elections in one of the federal states of Germany. According to preliminary election results, she won in Thuringia and in neighboring Saxony, she has only a minimal loss to the incumbent center-right Christian Democrats (CDU).
Voter turnout in Thuringia reached 73.6 percent, in Saxony 74.4 percent. According to preliminary results in Thuringia, the AfD won 32.8 percent of the vote, the CDU 23.6 percent, Sahra Wagenknecht’s far-left Alliance (BSW) 15.8 percent, and the Left (Die Linke) 13.1 percent. This is a significant drop from 2019, when the Left won with a margin of 31 percent. Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) won 6.1 percent of the vote, and their coalition partners at the national level, the Greens (3.2 percent) and the Free Democrats (FDP – 1.1 percent), did not make it to parliament.
In Saxony, after all the votes were counted, the CDU won 31.9 percent of the votes, the AfD 30.6 percent, the BSW 11.8 percent and the SPD 7.3 percent, the Greens 5.1 percent and the Left (4.5 percent) will only be in the state parliament thanks to two direct mandates.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
