Dhe AfD does not want to be dissatisfied with its Berlin election result, but it is a bit: State chairwoman and top candidate Kristin Brinker said on Monday that the AfD had definitely reached its voters with its “core issues”, such as internal security and combating inflation. The result, an increase of 1.1 percentage points to 9.1 percent, shows “that we have consolidated with our electorate in Berlin”. The federal chairman Tino Chrupalla also uses the term “consolidation”, but he admits that in view of a “national trend of 15 to 16 percent” for the AfD, the federal party in Berlin wanted “a double-digit result”.
As a special feature of Berlin, Brinker also emphasizes that according to the first analyzes of voter migration, the AfD “hardly lost any voters to the CDU”. The remark is an indication of the deeper causes of the AfD disappointment – it is caused less by its own result and more by the powerful success of the CDU.
regional imbalance
Since its inception, the AfD has successfully tried to collect votes from those voters who no longer wanted to find an addressee for their (protest) votes within the established party system. This mechanism apparently hardly worked in the Berlin House of Representatives elections; Those disappointed by the Berlin Senate government opted to a large extent for a “classic” opposition party.
Chrupalla states that this election was not about federal political issues; the topic of the war in Ukraine – in which the AfD tries to distinguish itself as a “peace party” on the side of Russia – was not the top priority, it was more about security issues. And with an indignant expression, the AfD chairman remarked that the CDU, of all people, which with its policy of “mass immigration” had “created the conditions” for weaknesses in internal security, such as the riots on New Year’s Eve, are now benefiting from theirs electoral success of it.
The details of the Berlin election result also reflect the strong regional imbalance in the AfD’s success. While the party won two direct mandates in the former East Berlin prefab districts and received more than 30 percent of the vote in some constituencies, it remained below the five percent hurdle in some constituencies in the former west of the city.
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