(CN) — The Social Democrats squeaked out a win against the surging far-right Alternative for Germany in hotly contested state elections on Sunday in Brandenburg, a result that left little room for relief for Germany’s centrist parties.
The center-left Social Democrats, the party of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, picked up 30.9% of the vote while the far-right AfD got 29.2%, according to preliminary results. A new far-left party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, came in third with 13.5% and the center-right Christian Democrats fourth with 12.1%.
These elections reflected the increasingly fragmented and chaotic political landscape in Germany, the European Union’s economic engine and a key leader. Political experts warn the country is veering toward a scenario where it will become extremely hard to form stable governments. The next national elections are in one year’s time.
This election in Brandenburg, a region surrounding Berlin, was particularly important for Scholz because the state has been a Social Democratic Party stronghold since the 1990s when former communist East Germany was reunited with West Germany. Also, Scholz resides in Potsdam, the capital of Brandenburg just outside Berlin.
With his popularity at rock bottom, a win in Brandenburg gave the chancellor a bit of breathing room, though many pundits ascribed the SPD’s success to Dietmar Woidke, the popular SPD incumbent president in Brandenburg, and to voters from other parties flocking to the SPD to prevent an AfD win.
Dan Hough, a political scientist at the University of Sussex in England who studies Germany, said the Social Democratic Party has reason to be relieved.
“Their vote share has gone up and they’ve finished ahead of the AfD,” he said in an email. “Many will claim (with some justification) that that’s all about the personalities and politics of the SPD-led regional government in Potsdam, but the SPD in Berlin will also be relieved.”
But the election was a disaster for Scholz’s coalition partners at the national level, the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats. That will deepen the troubles within his government. Neither party passed the 5% threshold to enter the state parliament in Potsdam.
The Brandenburg election was the last of three state elections in eastern Germany this September that sent shock waves across Europe due to the AfD’s successes. The party came first in Thuringia and second in Saxony. Thuringia was the first time since the end of the Nazi regime where a far-right party won a state election.
The AfD is considered a dire threat to German democracy due to members’ ties to neo-Nazi groups, scandals involving the use of Nazi symbols and rhetoric, its pro-Russia stance and its calls for mass deportation of immigrants. For the Brandenburg election, it ran dystopian AI-generated ads showing Muslim immigrants as a threat to German families. There is even a push to ban the party.
Along with the AfD, the three elections have been marked by the rapid success of a new party led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a 55-year-old, hard-left anti-capitalist politician who has called for restrictions on immigration and closer ties with Russia.
The success of both radical parties has thrown into chaos the formation of state governments in all three eastern regions and poses serious problems for the next national government.
Other parties are refusing to go into government with the AfD and that is making it very difficult for centrist parties that hold very different policy prescriptions to agree to work together.
This looks likely to be the case in Brandenburg because the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats — Germany’s traditional big-tent left- and right-wing forces — look set to have jointly 44 seats in the state parliament, one seat shy of a majority.
“The coalition scenario is a nightmare,” Hough said.
On Monday, Woidke said he would open talks with the Christian Democrats and Wagenknecht’s party to obtain a majority.
“It’s a coalition of the most unlikely participants, but the three parties will at least go through the motions of talking to each other,” Hough said.
Meanwhile, the AfD celebrated its success in Brandenburg and demanded a role in government, saying it was undemocratic for other parties to maintain a “firewall” against collaborating with it. In Potsdam, the AfD won enough seats to possibly block legislation
“The AfD will be happy, and they’ll be quietly content to cause mayhem on the opposition benches,” Hough said.
“They’d have liked to have come out in first place, but they can certainly live with running the SPD close.”
This month’s elections in eastern Germany must be viewed in their regional context because a clear cleavage has appeared over the past decade between voting instincts in eastern and western Germany.
While centrist parties remain dominant in western Germany, radical parties are dictating the course of events in those parts of the country formerly under communist rule.
In the east, the AfD has flourished, especially by attracting large numbers of younger voters, mostly males. This dynamic played out in Brandenburg with the AfD doing the best among younger voters.
To a lesser degree, eastern Germans also have flocked to far-left forces, as seen with the support picked up by Wagenknecht’s party in Brandenburg. She split off from the Left, a party with roots in former East Germany’s communist party, and her party is now hoovering up votes that once went for the Left.
Hough said many factors explain what’s happening in eastern Germany, though chief among them is lingering dissatisfaction with the way reunification has turned out for people in eastern Germany.
“With the transition to a democracy in 1990, one would have thought that would have made East Germans pretty happy about life,” he said in a telephone interview.
“You know, they used to get shot if they tried to flee to West Germany, right?” he said. “Well, that doesn’t happen anymore. But the transition to democracy, the transition to a social market economy, didn’t actually make East Germans feel particularly happy. In fact, they felt like second-class citizens.”
He said many people in eastern Germany still feel allegiances to the old communist system and even to the former Soviet Union. This, he said, has led them to rebel against a political system in Germany and Europe that they see as overly pro-Western and beholden to pro-American values.
This anti-Western sentiment became even more pronounced in the wake of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to allow 1 million refugees and asylum seekers into Germany and following the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
“What I often hear in East Germany is: ‘You’re all Western, you’re part of it, you’re part of the same story,” Hough said. “There’s a thread in East German identity, really, that wants to kick back against that; wants to kick back against what it feels has been 30 years of being told what to do by the West …. There’s a real feeling that they just got sick of being told what to do by all these guys who dominate German public life and come from West Germany.”
All of this, he said, explains the support for the AfD and Wagenknecht, both of which are calling for an end to support for Ukraine and negotiations with the Kremlin.
“It’s not that East Germans want to go back to being a satellite state of the Soviet Union,” he said. But still, he said many East Germans see the war in Ukraine as a consequence of American actions.
But it’s not just in the east where the AfD is doing really well. Nationally, polls show about 20% of the German electorate supports the party, making it the second most popular behind the Christian Democrats at around 32% and ahead of the Social Democrats at 14%.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.