Germany's regional elections threaten Scholz’s coalition

On a warm evening in August in the spa town of Bad Langensalza, Thuringia, a couple hundred people have gathered in a car park to hear a speech from a man in a pristine white shirt considered one of the most dangerous people in German politics: Björn Höcke, leader of the Thuringian branch of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The event, overlooked by the town's ivy-covered old city wall, has been pitched as a "summer party." There is beer, bratwurst, and balloons; children are getting their faces painted. Höcke, the last of several speakers, fairly springs onto the small stage with his arms spread wide, glowing with self-confidence.

No wonder: His party has been comfortably leading opinion polls in Thuringia for several months. The elections here and in neighboring Saxony are now just days away, on September 1, and the AfD could well win both of them.

The day before, a much less popular man in eastern Germany was visiting Dresden, capital of Saxony, to stick a symbolic spade in the ground for the foundation of an EU-supported Taiwanese semiconductor factory expected to provide 8,000 new jobs to the region.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz was there partly to save his future. His center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is hovering around 5% in opinion polls in both Saxony and Thuringia. That is a knife-edge — 5% is the hurdle for representation in the state parliaments, and if the SPD fails to clear it, Scholz could face serious questions before the national election in the fall of 2025.

"Scholz had great successes in the 2021 election in eastern Germany," Hans Vorländer, a political scientist at the Dresden University of Technology, told DW. "If they fail to make it into the parliaments now … I'm sure within the SPD there will be questions about Scholz's leadership ability and the next candidacy for chancellor."

An election about democracy

However many semiconductor factories arise in eastern Germany, the region often seems bogged down in grievance and fear — depopulated, far-right leaning, still affected by the economic aftermath of the reunification of East Germany with the West. The AfD has made an art of fostering these residual resentments. In Bad Langensalza, Höcke finishes his speech by calling on people to vote for him to prevent "the demise of the country." This, he said, is an election about "whether we want a future or not."

The listeners seem convinced. Even the floating voters at this "summer party" aren't put off by the racist statements AfD figures occasionally make — or that Germany's domestic intelligence agencies consider the Thuringian AfD to be even more extremist than the AfD as a whole. "A few things he said were pretty good," one undecided man told DW. "Like lowering taxes. But all the parties promise that before an election."

Not that everyone in Thuringia accepts the AfD as a legitimate option. Wherever Höcke campaigns, he has to shout down a whistling, jeering counter-demo made up of various left-wing anti-fascist groups. Just a day before the Bad Langensalza "summer party," the AfD was forced to cancel a Höcke event in the city of Jena because counterdemonstrators managed to break police lines and get into the event itself.

Höcke has long since learned to channel this hostility into his speeches. In between claiming that transvestites are teaching sex education in primary schools and migrants are bringing crime to Germany, he says that the government is becoming increasingly authoritarian. His parallels with the communist dictatorship that once ruled East Germany go down well with supporters in Bad Langensalza.

This stirring of real or imagined grievances is what all the other parties in Thuringia and Saxony have to deal with, especially those belonging to Scholz's center-left coalition.

The AfD's approach appears to be working. In Thuringia, the latest polls put the AfD at around 30%, way ahead of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) at 21%. In neighboring Saxony, the CDU is putting up a better fight, matching the AfD at around 30%.

Saxony and Thuringia: Similar but different

Though eastern Germany is often seen as a homogenous region, there are major political differences among the states. While Thuringia has been governed for the last decade by the socialist Left Party under State Premier Bodo Ramelow, Saxony has been led by Michael Kretschmer of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since 2017.

These two politicians' fortunes in the current election campaign could hardly be further apart. Kretschmer's CDU has just recently retaken the lead from the AfD in some polls, while Ramelow's time in office looks all but over. The Left Party's ratings have halved since the last election in 2019 and now languishing at 15%, and its current left-wing coalition partners, the SPD and the Greens, may well be completely eviscerated next week.

That means that in both states, the only possible coalitions that keep the AfD out of government (and all the other parties have promised to do that) appear to be an uncomfortable alliance between the CDU and Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW). It would be bizarre partnership: The former is a centrist party that likes to present itself as a rock of stability, tradition, and conservatism, the latter an upstart outfit less than a year old run by a former communist with a gift for populist rhetoric.

Upstart BSW

Sahra Wagenknecht, who splintered the Left Party she once led last year, has become immensely popular in eastern Germany, even though she is not actually on the ballot in the upcoming elections.

"Sahra Wagenknecht is a cult figure in eastern Germany. She leads the party autocratically, and she is a focus of the yearning for authority and leadership in the east," as Vorländer puts it.

An alliance with the BSW, which is polling at nearly 20% in Thuringia and over 10% in Saxony, is likely to be difficult to digest for some in the CDU. Apart from the fact that Wagenknecht was once a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the communist East German dictatorship, she is already making demands that will be difficult for the CDU to accept. For instance, that it should declare itself against the stationing of US medium-range ballistic missiles in Germany.

This kind of thing goes down well in eastern Germany, according to Vorländer. "A lot of people in eastern Germany have inherited a skepticism and rejection from GDR times against NATO," he said. "There are some anti-American attitudes, and there are still resistance reflexes to anything that comes from 'the West'."

In keeping with those instincts, both the BSW and the AfD have successfully tapped into fears among many eastern Germans about the Ukraine war, one of the issues that have come to dominate these elections.

The others are security and illegal immigration. The knife attack in Solingen, for which a Syrian refugee has been arrested has triggered a nationwide debate on immigration and deportation of rejected asylum seekers. Issues that resonate especially with supporters of the BSW and AfD — two anti-immigration parties.

And though the BSW has consistently distanced itself from the far-right AfD and ruled out any cooperation, one fact looms uncomfortably over this election: The two parties have more in common than sets them apart.

All this leaves Scholz's SPD in a desperate situation, especially because another eastern German state, Brandenburg, will hold an election three weeks later. Here, too, the AfD is leading the polls, with the SPD and CDU vying for second place.

Yet in some ways, it is Scholz's coalition partners that have the most to fear from these three elections. The Green Party, currently in government in all three states, is likely to lose that influence, while the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) are facing annihilation in the East — probably as punishment for hitching their wagon to the Scholz train. That does not bode well for Scholz's already fractious coalition.

Edited by: Rina Goldenberg

This article was first published on August 25 and was updated to reflect the debate around irregular immigration following the knife attack in Solingen.

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