A far-right party made strong gains in a pair of state elections in eastern Germany, but opponents from the political mainstream appeared on course to salvage their position as top vote-getters, election projections showed Sunday.
Voters in Saxony, a region of around 4.1 million people bordering Poland and the Czech Republic, and neighbouring Brandenburg, which has 2.5 million inhabitants and surrounds Berlin, elected new state legislatures.
All eyes were on the performance of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which is strongest in the ex-communist east, and on how badly the Germany’s governing parties would do after a rough 18 months for Chancellor Angela Merkel‘s coalition in Berlin.
A symbolically important AfD win in either state could have further destabilized the national government. AfD co-leader Joerg Meuthen declared himself “highly satisfied” with how the elections were shaping up, saying “things can’t go much better than this.”
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Centre-left and centre-right opponents that were on pace to salvage their position as the strongest parties in both region voiced some relief.
“The good signal in both states is that a few weeks ago the far-right was ahead, and today there was a clear signal against AfD,” said Lars Klingbeil, the general secretary of the centre-left Social Democrats — Merkel’s junior partners in Berlin.
“People don’t want AfD to be the strongest party there, but nevertheless it is a task for all democratic parties to see how we push them back,” Klingbeil continued. “These election results are much too high.”
Projections for broadcasters ARD and ZDF, based on exit polls and partial counting, suggested that the governing parties performed better than pre-election polling predicted. However, both lost ground compared with the last state elections in 2014 — before the migrant influx that boosted AfD’s support and helped it into Germany’s national parliament in 2017.
They showed Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union winning up to 33% of the vote in Saxony, which it has governed since German reunification in 1990, down from 39% five years ago. AfD was predicted to win around 28%, which would be its best performance yet in any state election and compares with 9.7% five years ago.
Near-complete results from Brandenburg showed the Social Democrats winning 26.2% of the vote, down from 31.9% five years ago and — like the CDU’s showing in Saxony — their worst in 29 years of democracy.
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The Social Democrats have led Brandenburg since reunification. AfD won 23.5%, up from 12.2% in the 2014 state election. .
Some voters may have returned to the big traditional parties to prevent AfD from winning.
The Greens, who have traditionally struggled in the east but surged in national polls over recent months, were seen with modest gains: scoring over 8% in Saxony and about 10% in Brandenburg. The environmentalist party may be needed to govern both regions.
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Merkel’s CDU and the Social Democrats govern Germany together in a fractious national coalition, and both are weak in national polls.
In Saxony and Brandenburg, they may face a potentially tricky search for new partners, as the coalitions both lead were in danger of losing their majorities. The CDU currently runs Saxony with the Social Democrats as its junior partner. The Social Democrats lead Brandenburg in a coalition with the Left Party, which is further to their left.
Mainstream parties have pledged not to form coalitions with the six-year-old AfD, which in any case has thrived on opposition.
Bernd Baumann, its chief whip in the national parliament, said it “pushes the issues forward that really interest people out there.”
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“I am glad that more and more people in the country say, ‘We will take our country back from the left-wing, green mainstream, from the old parties to certain media,”’ he said.
Saxony has long been a hotbed of far-right groups. It is not only an AfD stronghold, but also the state where the anti-migration group PEGIDA — Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West — rose to prominence with weekly protests in Dresden at the height of the 2015 migration crisis.
More broadly, AfD has tapped into disillusionment in the east, particularly in rural areas, among people who feel left behind after nearly three decades of German unity. Promises of equal living standards did not always become reality, salaries in the east still lag behind those in the west and many young people have left to seek opportunities elsewhere.
In comparison, AfD took 11% of the vote nationwide in the European Parliament election in May.
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