Germany‘s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won Sunday’s regional election in Saxony-Anhalt with about 44 percent of the vote, far ahead of the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU). It is the closest a far-right party has come to power at the state level in Germany since the Second World War.
The AfD fell just three seats short of an outright majority. Lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund said Monday that talks were already under way to win over individual MPs from other parties willing to help form a governing majority.
Read moreGermany’s far-right AfD wins big in key state election but falls short of majority
The result strains Germany’s “firewall” political consensus against working with the far right and much depends now on the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), a populist left-leaning but immigration-sceptic and pro-Russia party who the AfD could potentially rely on to build a coalition.
FRANCE 24 spoke to Ed Turner, a German politics specialist at Aston University in Birmingham, about what the result means for Saxony-Anhalt and Germany.
FRANCE 24: The AfD didn’t just win this election with its usual voters, it gained ground across almost every demographic in Saxony-Anhalt. What does that broader appeal tell us about how the party’s support base is evolving in Germany?
Ed Turner: The AfD did particularly well amongst some of the groups which you’d expect. That means working class voters, voters who think their own economic situation isn’t good, voters with a relatively low level of qualification – and those groups are particularly well represented in Saxony-Anhalt.
On top of that, there is something specifically eastern German about some of its support. For example, in eastern Germany, for partly historic and cultural reasons, there is much less support for Germany’s backing of Ukraine in its current war with Russia, and there’s a sense of being second-class citizens and wanting to give voice to that dissatisfaction.
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But it’s also the case that support was by no means confined to the usual suspects in a population. For example, amongst voters of different age groups, the AfD got over 40 percent in every group, apart from the over-70-year-olds, where it got 31 percent. So it did well across the board.
In Germany, people talk about parties with cross-society appeal as being “Volkspartei” [“people’s party”], and in a way, in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD is looking like a Volkspartei.
The AfD came within just a few seats of an absolute majority. Realistically, what are their options now?
I don’t see a path to preventing them taking office because it would require not just the CDU to work with the left party – if the numbers had stacked up, then the left party would have tolerated a CDU government – but also the minor party, the BSW, which has said they think it would be undemocratic to see the AfD completely excluded from government.
At some point in the next 30 days, the parliament will assemble to vote on who the minister-president [the state premier] should be in a secret ballot, and there are probably two routes there through for the AfD: one is that they find the BSW abstains, or alternatively, there might be some rebels from the CDU in the secret ballot who either abstain or even vote for their candidates. Either which way, it’s really difficult to imagine a scenario where they’re kept out.
What role could the BSW play in the aftermath of this election?
The BSW stands for Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht [Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance]. Wagenknecht was a long-standing left party parliamentarian who got her roots initially in east German communism but over time became associated with what some call a left-wing populism, where she would adopt left-wing economic positions, but at the same time quite conservative, right-wing positions on topics like immigration, and she also was very fiercely critical of Germany’s support for Ukraine. That party missed out on seats in the last federal election, but does have a particular appeal in the east.
Who could form a coalition with Germany’s AfD after election victory?
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They’ve come up with their own plan for Saxony-Anhalt, which is that there should be a non-political minister-president, and they should govern with whatever majorities – issue by issue – could be found. Nobody regards that as a serious proposition, but what it does do is it means they can say, “Well, we tried a different way, you lot weren’t interested in it so we now need to do something else and maybe fall in behind the AfD.”
Their candidates also talked about some areas where they could see policy commonalities with the AfD, so that is a party which potentially could help the AfD.
What could the AfD implement at the local state level in terms of policy in Saxony-Anhalt?
In Germany, states have a very high level of autonomy when it comes to education and the AfD has already said it wants to radically overhaul the school curriculum, particularly on sensitive topics around history – they’ve mentioned doing “more Bismarck and less Hitler”. They’ve also talked about unravelling integration of children with learning disabilities into mainstream education.
They’ve also mentioned defunding the Protestant Church because they think it takes too active a stance on social questions.
There’s also the oversight of the police and the judiciary as well as public service broadcasting, and the AfD has talked about unravelling some agreements to have a common broadcasting framework between three East German states, which would give it a greater voice in public service media.
Read moreGermany: Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the ideologist behind the AFD’s plans in Saxony-Anhalt
Germany has long maintained a “firewall” consensus to keep the far right out of government. Does this result suggest that consensus is starting to crack, and what would that mean for German politics more broadly?
The firewall has been pulled down because the far right is very likely to enter the state government in Saxony-Anhalt.
The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is considered to be a confirmed right-wing extremist party. It is a much more radical creature than, for example, the French National Rally or Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and because of that radicalism, because it won’t trim its message in order to gain power, I think it’s very unlikely to end up in government on a federal level. Instead, its presence and its growing support makes it just much, much harder for mainstream parties to govern.
So what we’re seeing is that mainstream German parties are finding it almost impossible to form a government in order to keep the AfD out of power, which has any sort of agreements on the important issues of the day, and so without being anywhere near power, they’re causing absolute chaos.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
