George Austerfield
Will the winners be willing to keep their pre-election promises and not join the ranks of election winners who regularly disappoint their voters?
Now it has happened. OK it was just a State Election, and not the national, General Election, so no national government stood to be upset. Nonetheless, the unspeakable and in some cases unbelievable has actually come to pass. The AfD, the pariah party has won the election in Saxony - Anhalt. Not just won but by a landslide victory. In addition to this, if there is such a thing as a landslide defeat then that happened too.
Looking at the winners first, it was in all the pre-election polls that the AfD had a comfortable lead over all participating parties. This implied that the election results would turn out accordingly. This happened with a vengeance. The only party with a realistic chance of, well at least closing the gap was the CDU, the party of chancellor Merz and one of the governing parties in the Berlin coalition.
Thanks to, in some eyes short-sighted policy decisions and propagandistic speeches, the popularity of Mr. Merz and his party dropped continuously. This Sunday's elections. The other competing parties never has a chance to stop the AfD. Their results show this in a manner that cannot be papered over.
The provisional official final results: -77.82% turnout 1,315,315 valid votes
AfD 39 seats 43.79% 576,037
CDU 15 seats 17.23% 226,622
SPD 8 seats 9.30% 122,303
Grüne 8 seats 8.93% 117,498
Die Linke 8 seats 8.56% 112,541
BSW 5 seats 5.27% 69,291
FDP no seats 2.58% 33,969 missed the 5% hurdle
Freie Wähler no seats 1.17% 15,430 missed the 5% hurdle
Others no seats 3.16% 41,624 missed the 5% hurdle
Difference to the last election 2021, gains and losses:
These numbers are next to normal for elections, making the first two highly significant and highly unusual, to say the least.
The majority needed to form a government is 42 seats. The BSW only just made to 5% hurdle by 0.27%. Marginal but highly potent. They have similar positions on several key issues, Russia, War and energy being the main ones. Do the math. (A little help from a friend: 39 + 5 = 44)
Looking at the runners-up (losers would be a better term but not diplomatic enough), one can see the distance in the percentage.
9.30 to 17.23 and that is the partner in the national government.
Given that the SPD, the traditional working-man's party has been losing support since basically the era of Schroeder and his Agenda 20/20. No matter how many experts argued that these reforms were necessary, the working-class felt betrayed. So the demise of the SPD was to be expected.
Panic has now broken out in the political establishment. The program the AfD has been canvassing offers a different approach to the problems occupying the electorate. The government is arduously creating horror vision after horror vision, the latest being the drone and cyberattacks by the Russians and the upcoming invasion of Germany and then Europe by the same, and offering near to no help to the "man on the street" trying to cope with the geo-political fallout. While this is happening, the AfD offers some illusion of a solution. Peace initiatives toward Russia and ideas that could solve some of the hardships facing the German people. If all this comes to fruition when the political work begins needs to be seen. Regarding the AfD, there is no form-book to glean evidence from.
The usual pundits started to lament about the dangers to the German democracy immediately the exit-polls came online. The AfD is looked upon as the ultimate danger to democracy and the internal intelligence agency is classing them as ultra-right wing and anti-constitution. To save the democracy it was the hope that the BSW would not make the 5% and so the Parliament could stand on hold so to speak as the present government could stay in power provisionally because there would not be a majority to elect the AfD candidate as state Prime Minister.
This classification in different directions, left - middle- right wing, with ultra-left and ultra-right thrown in for good measure. The on the outside one finds extreme prefixed as needed. AfD is ultra-right.
The CDU, out of which the AfD initially split classes itself as middle. The middle is overcrowded as the SPD, FDP and Greens also see themselves there too. The CDU has been using ideas canvassed by the AfD to try and regain the followers they lost to the AfD over the last years.
This is mostly ignored by the said pundits, as is the notion that if you run an election campaign on fear-mongering against a party, already more popular than you yourself, offering solutions to solve the causes of this exact fear, you will likely lose. Which happened, with a vengeance.
So there is such a thing called a land-slide defeat. That is when you lose about 50% in an election. Two things remain to be seen. The first being, will the losers learn from their mistakes. The second is will the winners be willing and able to keep their pre-election promises and not join the ranks of election winners who regularly disappoint their voters, a tradition not exclusive to Germany.