German state elections | Door-to-door polls: Germany’s ruling party remains the largest in the state surrounding Berlin, partly with the far-right AfD second

Potsdam

German According to door-to-door polls published by the ZDF channel, Germany’s ruling party, the Social Democrats, is on its way to victory in the Brandenburg state elections in eastern Germany.

The social democratic SPD is getting 32 percent of the vote. The SPD has been the state’s ruling party since German reunification in 1990.

In second place is the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) with 29 percent support, which would be 5.5 percentage points more than the last election.

The election setup is extremely tricky. The SPD is also increasing its support by almost 6 percentage points.

The final results will be known only later.

“Our goal was that our state does not get a big brown stamp,” the state director Dietmar Woidke (SPD) said after the door-to-door polls became public at his party’s election conference in Potsdam.

“I’m glad if we succeeded.”

In Germany, the color brown still refers to the extreme right, according to the uniforms used during the Nazi era.

A left-wing populist founded only at the beginning of the year Sahra Wagenknecht the new party BSW is getting 12 percent support.

Both AfD and BSW oppose immigration and German arms aid to Ukraine.

Brandenburg is a state surrounding Berlin on the Polish border. During the Cold War, the Brandenburg region was part of the socialist East Germany, or GDR.

The rise of fringe parties in the area of ​​the former East Germany has been explained by economic inequality: Western Germany is still more prosperous.

In recent years, however, more jobs have been added to Brandenburg, for example with the new Tesla car factory. In addition, the state has received billions of dollars in subsidies for the restructuring of coal mining areas.

AfD has also clearly increased its support in other state elections in the area of ​​the former East Germany.

The state elections in Thuringia in eastern Germany at the beginning of September were the first since the Nazi era, when a far-right party became the largest. In the Saxony state elections held on the same day, the party was the second largest.

The German domestic intelligence has defined the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia as being confirmed as far-right. In Brandenburg, the party is defined a little more leniently: according to domestic intelligence, Brandenburg’s AfD as a whole is a suspected far-right case, even though some of the local politicians are confirmed far-right.

The German domestic intelligence agency Verfassungsschutz, as its name suggests, supervises the implementation of Germany’s constitutionality. Actors who pursue policies against the constitution are defined as far-right.

Domestic intelligence can use intelligence methods to monitor party parts defined as extreme right-wing. For example, defining Germanness based on ethnicity can be classified as undermining the basic values ​​of democracy.

Germany’s other parliamentary parties have categorically refused to cooperate with the AfD, which is why the party’s rise to state governments is very unlikely.

Brandenburg is the Chancellor of the Social Democratic Party By Olaf Scholz home state, which is why the election result is more important than the state.

Scholz is not a candidate in the state elections himself, but the Brandenburg elections have been seen as a very important measure of his status.

Within the Democratic Party, there has been talk of the possibility of changing the chancellor candidate before next year’s federal election.

It is possible that the same thing will happen to Scholz as to the President of the United States For Joe Biden. The ruling party may replace a weak candidate with another one, even if it is a leading politician sitting in office.

Scholz’s most significant challenger to become the next chancellor is the chairman of the conservative CDU Friedrich Merz.

The CDU also lost support in the Brandenburg state elections. According to door-to-door polls, it is getting 11.5 percent support.

Germany is a federal state where the states have a lot of independent decision-making power. The Federal Council, consisting of representatives of the governments of Germany’s 16 states, meets regularly to deal with laws enacted by the German parliament, the Bundestag.