A far-right party has won a regional election in Germany for the first time since the Second World War. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party took 32.8% of the vote in the poll in the eastern state of Thuringia on Sunday, giving it a clear win over the conservative CDU, which came second with 23.6%. In neighbouring Saxony, the CDU defeated the AfD by just 31.9% to 30.6%.
Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in Thuringia, who was fined in July for using a Nazi slogan, hailed the victory as "historic" and warned rival parties against excluding it from any coalition deals in the regional parliament. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose SPD party was trounced in both states, urged other parties to govern without the AfD , which he accused of "ruining our country's reputation".
The AfD was helped by events before these polls, said The Guardian : it had ruthlessly capitalised on the killing of three people, allegedly by a failed asylum seeker, in Solingen last month. Nevertheless, the results have "sent shockwaves of fear and despair across Europe".
The results have "sent shockwaves of fear and despair across Europe". It was especially humiliating for Scholz, said The Times . His governing coalition has proved "one of the weakest in the Federal Republic's history", and all three of the mismatched parties within it fared badly. The results prompted Scholz to hold urgent talks with other party leaders on how to form state governments without the AfD – and even on "how to hold together his fractious coalition".
Normally, regional German elections wouldn't cause much of a stir in the rest of the country, let alone in the wider world, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail . Only six million people live in Thuringia and Saxony, about 7% of Germany's population. But the AfD's first regional election win since its creation in 2013 is a "scary development".
Why? Because unlike other European populist parties, which in recent years have "moderated their image in the pursuit of power", the AfD has grown ever more extreme , said James Crisp and James Jackson in The Daily Telegraph . And nobody typifies this shift like Höcke. A former history teacher, he has criticised Germany for dwelling on the crimes of the Holocaust; he seems to model his rhetoric on Hitler's; his young supporters call themselves the "Höcke Youth", an echo of the Hitler Youth; and members of his own party have tried to expel him for being too extreme. Yet none of that deterred voters in Thuringia, who have gifted him an extraordinary personal triumph.
This was no failure of democracy, said Katja Hoyer in The Guardian : there were lively public debates before polling day; and turnout was at a record high. But the AfD's tough message on migration, and its calls to end the war in Ukraine , appealed to voters anxious about rising energy prices, and about Germany's ailing economy.
So far, Scholz has tried to combat the AfD by echoing its hardline rhetoric, said Hanno Hauenstein in the same paper : in the wake of the Solingen terror attack, he proposed tightening border controls and stepped up deportations of asylum seekers. But that strategy isn't working. Why? Because voters in places such as Thuringia are frustrated about more than migration and war, said Christoph Hickmann in Der Spiegel . When roads and bridges are dilapidated and "every train ride is a lottery", a feeling takes hold that "nothing works anymore", and that nobody in Berlin cares. It's this sense of hopelessness that mainstream parties must address if they are to halt the AfD's rise.
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