Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke this week for the first time in the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament, where he was received by a standing chamber amidst enthusiastic applause. During his speech, in which he warned against the rise of far-right parties in the EU, he probably noticed that there were many empty seats. Dozens of deputies boycotted him in his absence. Both the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and the left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) gave instructions to leave the chamber when the Ukrainian president arrived. It is one of the many things that unites them: his position, expressed in a more or less patent way, pro-Russian and hostile towards the Ukrainian cause.
Anti-immigration policies are the other point of contact between two parties that, combined with their votes, have convinced almost one in four Germans. In last Sunday’s European elections, more than 22% of voters opted for parties at the extremes of the political spectrum. In the east, the former territory of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), the shift towards these formations away from the center is even more striking. 40% of voters voted for AfD or BSW, becoming the first and third forces respectively in the state oriental.
The European elections have confirmed the decline of what the renowned sociologist Manfred Güllner calls the “Republic of Bonn”, that is, the parties established when Bonn was still the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, before reunification. Despite the comfortable victory of the Christian Democrats on Sunday, the founder of the Forsa demoscopic institute highlights a very significant fact for him: the Christian Democrats of the CDU/CSU, the Social Democrats of the SPD, the liberals of the FDP and the Greens were barely voted for anything less than 40% of all Germans with the right to vote. “More than 60% voted for the parties of the ‘Berlin Republic’ or none at all,” he says, referring to recent formations such as the AfD, the left of Die Linke and BSW, on the one hand, and the abstentionists, on the other.
Dissatisfaction with the government coalition is “extremely high, historically high,” emphasizes Thorsten Faas, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin, but the results of the extreme parties are not explained solely by the protest vote and disappointment with the parties. traditional, he adds. “If we look at the issues that have dominated the campaign, war and peace, Ukraine, responses to migration, we see that AfD and BSW are the ones that take different positions from other parties. Their thematic offering differentiates them from the rest,” he says. This is how they convinced a large number of voters. “They were really the clear winners of election night,” he summarizes.
The charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht, an icon of the radical left, has burst onto the German political scene in a big way with a formation that split from Die Linke just six months ago. With 6.2% of the votes, her debut is considered a success that preludes even better results in the regional elections to be held in Thuringia, Brandenburg and Saxony next September. Wagenknecht’s cocktail of far-left populism mixes restrictive immigration policies, calls for “peace” and against sending military aid to Ukraine, and social justice proposals that improve the conditions of workers and retirees.
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“It has the potential to replace Die Linke also in the federal elections,” write Catrina Schläger, Christos Katsioulis and Jan Niklas Engels in their post-election analysis for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. For Faas, it offers a combination that could not be found in other formations: “Until now you had to decide whether to vote for the left or cast a more traditional, authoritarian and nationalist vote, so to speak. In BSW both things come together.”
The results of the European elections “could not surprise anyone who has followed the mood of the country in recent weeks,” says Peter Matuschek, manager of the Forsa polling institute. The latest survey by his company that asked about preferences for the next federal elections (scheduled for autumn 2025) already offered very similar data. And it made it clear that a good part of the citizens do not trust Olaf Scholz’s government coalition to solve the country’s problems. But neither in the main opposition party, the Christian Democrats of the CDU.
Little trust in Government and opposition
The conservatives fail to capitalize on the weakness of the tripartite. Matuschek highlights a fact from the latest survey: less than one in five Germans (18%) trust that the SPD, the Greens or the FDP can face the challenges. But the same small proportion (18%) trust the competition of CDU and its Bavarian partner CSU.
The success of BSW is surprising as it is a newly created formation, but in the case of AfD what is striking is that they have not been penalized for the various scandals in which they have been involved in recent months. Secret meetings with neo-Nazis to expel millions of people with migrant origins, accusations of espionage for China, dubious relations with Russia of its head of the list in Brussels, Maximilan Krah, which forced the party to hide him in the final stretch of the campaign … None of this has made a dent in the party’s results, which at most has lost two or three percentage points compared to the estimates prior to the scandals. It is one of the main differences between these two formations. While BSW bases its victory on Wagenknecht’s notoriety, in the AfD people do not seem to have any relevance, notes Faas.
Nobody doubts the success of these two parties in the East in the next regional elections. In addition to the data from the European elections, elections were held in local councils on Sunday and in some of them both parties obtained more seats than candidates had presented themselves. The question for the fall is how the cordon sanitaire against the AfD will be maintained and what role the traditional right will play. The issues that interest Germans now were clear in the Forsa survey the day after the European elections: the improvement of the country’s economic situation (68%) and the better management of immigration (67%).
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