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September 1, 2024 - 9:00pm
Elections in the German regions of Thuringia and Saxony are set to produce exactly the results that the country’s mainstream politicians were dreading.
In Thuringia, projections show a big win for the far-Right AfD on about a third of the vote. That’s well ahead of the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in second place.
A second populist party, Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW, has taken about one in six votes. The parties which make up the national government — the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens — have suffered dismal results. All three lost support, and it looks as if the Greens and FDP will fall below the 5% threshold required for seats.
The projected result in next door Saxony was only slightly better. The AfD was already strong there, and is one point behind the Christian Democrats for first place. The Social Democrats limped in well behind the BSW. Meanwhile, the Greens are hovering around the 5% threshold and the Free Democrats have been obliterated.
In both regions, forming coalition governments is going to be a trial. In Saxony, the existing CDU-SPD-Green coalition might just survive — unless, that is, the Greens fall below the threshold and thus lose all their seats.
It’s even worse in Thuringia, where none of the conventional coalitions are mathematically possible. The taboo against having the AfD in office will be maintained despite its clear first place. If a Right-wing populist such as Marine Le Pen won’t work with the AfD, then don’t expect Germany’s establishment politicians to drop their cordon sanitaire.
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Subscribethe far-Right AfD
Whoever makes the over-arching editorial decisions at UnHerd needs to ban the use of the term ‘far Right’. Most of the parties and groups thus labelled are no further to the ‘Right’ than any of Europe’s social democratic parties – Labour or the Conservatives in the UK, for instance – were a decade ago.
Sooner or later we are going to have to have a grown-up conversation about the cultural and economic impact of mass immigration – and especially mass illegal immigration. The pretence that those opposed to the open borders policies are somehow going to start stomping around in jackboots and re-opening concentration camps should they win power needs to be dropped.
We expect that kind of thing in hysterical and childish outlets like the Guardian. Let’s not have it in UnHerd.
The AfD are literal Nazis. If the cap fits….
If being called far right makes you sad then maybe you need to stop with the extremist and bigoted politics – just a thought!
Judging by your behaviour I’d suggest the cap fits you somewhat better than it fits the AfD. Nazism is, after all, almost the definition of a champagne socialist ideology.
If the outlook for people’s lives and the incompetence of your governing is so bad that people are considering voting for literal Nazis then maybe you need to stop with your elitist and tyrannical politics – just a thought!
Quite! But a better idea may be to label any Left party as far Left…they probably are.
Good idea but all the other parties, apart from possibly the CDU, would then be far left.
Genau
Extreme Left.
But the question is what is “far-right” in German? Google says “rechtsextreme.” So I suppose “far-left” is “linksextreme.”
Ganz genau.
The article used the expression “other populist party” when describing a left wing grouping . Swapping the “far right” label for “populist right” might be a sensible approach. Either way, it seems reasonable to assume that nearly all journalists that use the term “far right” are either lazy, ignorant or both.
Why don’t we just describe it as the ‘democratic right’? All we are seeing is a rebellion against political elites who have been ignoring their own mandates for decades.
Absolutely! The rise of more extreme parties is entirely down to the undemocratic, technocratic elites believing they know best and therefore don’t need to listen to the demos – the plebs get there say every 4 to 5 years in elections, we then create coalitions to exclude parties that are not part of the elite club so we can carry on completely disregarding what the democratic process is screaming at them.
Denmark’s centrist politicians actually bothered to listen to its people and instigate policies which do address the legitimate concerns of ordinary Danes and have thereby seen off the rise of more extreme parties.
Annalena Baerbock (Greens co-leader and disastrous Foreign Secretary) flat out said she doesn’t care what her voters say.
It looks like the voters in these two states have sent her the same message.
This morning’s Spectator equivalent shows a far better approach.
Let’s not forget Pol Pot! He doesn’t get mentioned anywhere enough here!
Unherd, Germany’s solar obsession is killing its economy, quote:
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“Amid reports of Germany’s economy contracting, Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action Robert Habeck has made a sub-optimal if predictable announcement. Citing renewables as Germany’s primary future energy source, Habeck said that manufacturing businesses should adjust their production according to the weather. German industry, he insisted, should produce more when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. On still or cloudy days, production should be allowed to falter.”
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This idiot is not a fool, he is a violent mental patient, his place is in a madhouse. As well as the all of them, who are in power in Germany now.
Please, stop name AfD & BSW “populist”. Compared to the current psychopathic rulers, they are just ordinary people.
Ordinary racist people.
There – fixed it for you!
Nonce.
Yes, sham-pain, you’re right.
It is racist to think that telling globally competitive industries they can only run their factories when the sun is shining goes beyond stupid, veering into the psychopathic.
Because competitive, functioning economies are fundamentally racist.
This guy (it’s obviously a guy) must have the world’s highest boredom threshold, don’t you think?
You’re the only racist here, bro. I’m not kidding, this follows from what you are writing here.
He’s got a problem. Globalist elites need their wedge issues to win the votes they need in the jurisdictions that matter, so that means towing the party line. Even if it impoverishes people you think you don’t care about until they turn up with pitch forks.
That is an astonishing thing to say (habeck that is). How does he imagine that continuos flow production processes like steel or ammonia or glass are going to work?
The loony Greens just initiated to blast the two cooling towers of a perfectly working nuclear plant to smithereens. Anybody, who thinks that the Greens care for so-called Man Made Climate Change needs their head examined. The most shocking part about it was that the two other parties in the “Ampel” coalition let this happen.
Something about this tale brings to mind Pol Pot and his “Year Zero” …
There it is! A Pol Pot sighting! He’s been resurrected in hyperbole-speak!
In the comments section of the recent Unherd article “Is the New York Times turning against DEI?” I just remarked on how people associate significant yet conventional problems de jour with wild extremes like the Spanish Inquisition, or Hitler or the Soviet Union or China. However, I said that Pol Pot has long fallen out of favour. And behold! Somebody went there!
This changes things. I’m feeling better about Genghis Khan’s chances.
To repeat: embracing these clichés just showcases the very non-think/group-think that commentators so often denounce. People who do this undermine their own credibility and whatever point they’re trying to make. Readers who value reflection over reflex will have reservations about those who use such stock extremes, even if their core points may have merit.
I have no idea what you’re on about.
It seems perfectly reasonable to see some parallel between deliberate destruction of an advanced society and Year Zero.
Sorry if free speech upsets you so much.
Oh dear.
“Net Zero” and “Year Zero” do sound alike.
There’s nothing wrong with being “populist”, the alternative is being elitist, which is going to kill us all.
You quoted the author of the recent Unherd opinion piece “Germany’s solar obsession is killing its economy.” I encourage you, and/or others, to also read some of the comments there because important context was omitted from the opinion piece. If you learn it you can understand the issue better than the writer wanted to allow. He was more interested in convincing readers of his framing of reality than in trying to get as close to the truth as possible. That doesn’t necessarily mean you will think differently about the issue, but at least you will know what Habeck said and the context in which he said it. You will better comprehend its meaning.
Energy transition is complex and very tricky. The article was unhelpful because it was reductive, on purpose. We have to watch for that, no matter where we stand on an issue.
Well, flicking through the German news this morning and seeing photos of Ricarda Lang of the Greens sniffing and snivelling and blaming everyone else for yesterday’s debacle for the federal government made me chuckle. And still, she can’t seem to understand the very simple notion that it is the politics of her own party that is driving people to vote for anti-establishment outfits like the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.
She was quoted in Welt as moaning that “the BSW has nothing to offer”. No love, it does. At the very least, it gives voters who have had it up to here **gestures somewhere above own head** with Berlin’s idiocy to give you all a good poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Voters in the east aren’t dim or backwards – they know exactly what they’re doing and a lot of them remember this kind of overweening, overbearing state action from before 1989. And they don’t like it.
It’s the inverse of the film “Field of Dreams”. Rather than “if you build it, they will come” it’s “if you allow it to fall into disrepair, they will leave”. Or at least vote for someone else not associated with ‘establishment’ ideology.
I’m not sure if your last sentence is entirely accurate. I’ve heard that East Germans voting for anti-establishment parties are so disillusioned that they are actually nostalgic for the GDR. But my evidence is anecdotal.
There’s always been a bit of DDR-nostalgia – sighing about life in the Plattenbau and that kind of thing. But all the people I know who remember Communism and lived through it said it was dreadful and there is little desire to even talk about it.
I remember the film “Goodbye Lenin” coming out in 2002-3 and it representing a certain kind of watershed in talking about and portraying the fall of the DDR – more than a decade after the fact.
I went to see it in the cinema in Munich and asked my friend who grew up in East Berlin whether she wanted to come – it was a definite no, she didn’t want to see it at all and I got the clear impression I shouldn’t press the issue. Even now, I think the DDR is something that only gets discussed in her family late at night at Christmas when significant volumes of alcohol have been consumed.
Edit: Nostalgia for Yugoslavia is much more common in my experience.
I visited Berlin a few years ago and it seemed DDR nostalgia was all over the place, in a tourist-friendly sort of way. The sections of wall, the Lada tours, Checkpoint Charlie, the Stasi Museum, and the DDR museum which seemed to represent East Germany in an almost comic light.
By contrast, anything to do with the Nazis was very hard to find, apart from the huge Red Army burial grounds.
That’s all for the tourists. And the Red Army burial grounds are protected by international law, it’s nothing to do with nostalgia.
I remember when I first went to East Germany not long after the Wall came down (my West German uncle having moved there to head a bank branch). My “bucket list” goal was to drive a Trabant, which I achieved.
There is an interesting wikipedia “communist nostalgia” where they link to survey results from many former communist countries. The results were pretty surprising to me. The thing with nostalgia is, of course, that one might idealize the past. But still.
There is always nostalgia for an idealised past. The British have a nostalgia for Victorian times. Sure, Britain was the most powerful nation in the world, but most people lived a Dickensian life.
It was amusing to watch the ARD coverage last night when they talked to Lang at the Green election party/wake. Halfway through the interview a burly bloke in too much make-up and a frilly green dress waltzed in to take up position in the camera field of view just off-centre. If one had tried to contrive a metaphor for the political party utterly out of touch with the electorate one couldn’t have done better.
The first statistics are by the EU and of course AfD’s column is brown (hint hint), but their colour in Germany is actually blue. The myth, that AfD is so extreme far right, that even (the former antisemitic) LePen doesn’t want the AfD in her section of the EU Parliament, happened because the leader of AfD Thuringia, Hoecke, proclaimed at a rally: “Alles für die Heimat, Alles für Deutschland“. Supposedly the “Deutschland” bit was a slogan, which was also used by the SA, but historically originated from the Social Democrats in the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless the courts condemned Hoecke to pay a fine, because as a History Teacher he should have known the slogan’s association with the Nazis. So much for freedom of speech in Germany…
Right now all established German Parties are having a collective mental break down.
The categorisation of the AfD as “extreme right” comes from a finding of the German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, essentially a federal police agency. It is not independent, but subject to the instructions of the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
When its then-president, Hans-Georg Maaßen, in 2018 refused to produce Verfassungsschutz reports in synch with the government’s desired message, he was summarily fired.
This is also nothing new – I distinctly remember a Horst Haitzinger caricature from the ’70s captioned “our guard-dog is at it again”, depicting a mastiff labelled Verfassungsschutz chained in front of the house, and peeking through the keyhole into the house.
The AfD does have its unsavoury members and supporters, but the Verfassungsschutz finding still has to be taken with a large helping of salt.
Very noticable how much lower the support for the SPD, Like (new left) and Greens is in Thuringia and Saxony compared to Germany as a whole. Very little support for the left/”progressives” at all in Thuringia. It’s almost as if the regions that lived through over 40 years of Soviet colonisation and Communism don’t much go in for luxury beliefs.
Note: anyone thinking that these eastern regions (Thuringia, Saxony) are somehow “backward” would do well to remember that these were amongst the most advanced and developed German regions before WWII.
Also, the only reason that parties like the AfD exist is that the traditional parties gave up on doing their job and listening to and representing people rather than telling them what to do or think. It would be great if the old parties tuned in and got the message, but there are few signs of that happening.
BSW’s economical policies are very left. The leader of BSW in Thuringia, Katja Wolf, conveniently switched from the Linke to BSW in 2024. She served as a mayor of Eisenach, and one of her former position was the environmental spokesperson for the Linke. There is no miraculous disappearance of left wing politics in Thuringia. Many Green, SPD and Linke voters switched to BSW. Because of Wagenknecht’s charisma her image was mostly on the election posters, although she officially can’t interfere in local policies.
In my opinion the whole BSW isn’t a real party, more of a one woman’s movement…
Saxony is another matter, people there always voted much more conservatively.
There is an old adage in Germany: One in ten Germans is a Saxon, and the other nine make fun of him for being so.
Don’t forget that a lot of what was Germany before WW2 isn’t Germany any more. The town my (German) mother was born in is now in the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia.
“The parties which make up the national government — the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens — have suffered dismal results.”
Connect the dots, UnHerd. These parties are losing not because of some fantasy of re-born fascism, but because common people know they have consistently, over decades, betrayed them in favor of an elitist Progressivism that enables criminality, destruction and despair.
And by the way, the people waving Antifa flags are not “anti-fascists,” as some editor described them in the photo cutline. They are in fact the actual fascists.
Not 21st century populism but 21st century concerns of citizens who were ignored and treated with contempt by the established parties.
Democracy is now the political system where a cabal of party leaders conspire to prevent the people you actually voted for from taking office.
Well, people voted for the parties those people are the leaders of too.