Far Right Gains in Germany

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

 

As was widely predicted, Angela Merkel has won a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor in the Sept. 24 Bundestag election. But it’s a victory that feels like a loss.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its allies won less than 33 per cent of the vote, good for 246 seats, but sharply down from 41.5 per cent in 2013. It’s the lowest result for them since she became leader.

The Social Democrats, who had been in a “grand coalition” with the CDU, slumped to 20.5 per cent, a new post-war low, for 153 seats. They too came up short, their vote down from 25.7 per cent four years ago.

The populist Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) comfortably took third place in the election, ahead of parties like the Free Democrats, Alliance 90/the Greens, and the Left.

With almost 13 per cent of the vote, the AfD gained 94 seats in the 598-seat federal parliament. A far-right party has now entered parliament for the first time in seven decades.

Each person casts two votes in a Bundestag election, to allocate the 598 seats. Half of these seats are individual constituencies , where candidates win in first-past-the-post contests.

The remaining 299 are for party lists, allocated near-proportionately to the party vote share in each of Germany’s 16 federal states. 

To be included in this process, a party must achieve at least five per cent of the national vote. 

There has been some disarray in the AfD, and one of its most prominent figures, Frauke Petry, has left the caucus and announced she would sit as an independent.

She championed a course that aimed to make the party more amenable to moderate voters, while more radical party members insist the AfD’s job is to remain an opposition party outside the centrist politics practised by Merkel and Social Democratic leader Martin Schulz.

The AfD’s leading voices now are a study in opposites. Representing the far-right is 76-year-old Alexander Gauland, a critic of Petry’s. He is a lawyer and journalist who was a member of the Angela Merkel’s own Christian Democratic Union for 40 years. 

The more moderate faction will now be led by 38-year-old economist Alice Weidel, who lives at least part-time in Switzerland with her female partner and two children.

Weidel said Petry’s walkout was “hard to beat in terms of irresponsibility” and urged her to leave the party altogether “to prevent further harm.”

The AfD has vowed to shake the consensus politics of Germany. Gauland told party supporters after the results, referring to the CDU: “We will go after them. We will claim back our country.”

The AfD got its start in 2013 as a rebellion against European Union plans to bail out debt-stricken Greece. In that year’s German parliamentary vote, the AfD won 4.7 per cent, nearly meeting the five per cent threshold to win seats.

But it was the backlash against Merkel’s response to the 2015 refugee crisis that came to define the AfD’s image, and that pushed its support to 15 per cent or more in polls taken early last year. 

So, while the AfD did well in this election, its support is still slightly down from last year. That’s because Merkel stopped the continuing flow of migrants into the country, making it less of an issue, as things quieted down. 

Sensing that the anti-immigrant right was stealing her thunder, she tightened up asylum rules. The number of refugee arrivals plummeted and the crisis began to fade.

Following her victory, Merkel attacked “illicit migration” and said “internal and domestic security” would be one of the focuses of coming months.

Still, the more than 1.5 million already there won’t be going away. So for the anti-immigrant sector of the population, frustrations will remain.

The Social Democrats have now formally ruled out the possibility of a new “grand coalition” with the Christian Democrats, in order to prevent the AfD from becoming the official opposition.

Indeed, Schulz told Merkel on live television that she was the election’s “biggest loser.” 

He’s right. 

Low unemployment and a strong economy were apparently not enough for voters to forgive Merkel for her handling of the refugee crisis.

Should the economy start to lose steam, this might propel the AfD to even better results in 2021.