Europeans. “Anti-government vote”: in Germany, the right and the far right win the elections
“Ouch ouch ouch, the traffic lights are on fire” So how Die Zeit summarizes the situation in Germany, at the end of the European elections. The German government coalition – nicknamed “traffic light” because of the colors of the formations that make it up – is in bad shape.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Green Party and the Liberal Party (FDP) obtained around 14%, 12% and 5% respectively, according to initial estimates. They are therefore all three behind the far right of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came second with more than 16%.
But also behind the Christian conservatives of the CDU-CSU union, who won more than 30% of the votes and are therefore the big winners of the election in the federal republic.
“Bad omen”
For the left-wing newspaper The Tageszeitung, these results are the result of a “anti-government vote”. And they say a lot about the state of mind of voters across the Rhine, a year before the next legislative elections. “The last time the ruling parties achieved such poor results was in 2004. A year later, the Social Democrats and Greens were finished. You don’t have to be a soothsayer to see this as a bad omen.”
However, the government had made efforts to convince voters, REMARK Die Welt. “The fact that the Social Democrats insisted so much during the campaign on the need to preserve peace (in Europe) is not only linked to their political identity, but also to the polls,” explains the conservative Berlin newspaper, which specifies that a majority of Germans fear that the war in Ukraine will spread. Their increasingly firm stance on migration issues is also notable. But no matter how hard the SPD struggled, “he has lost his core target and has failed to present himself as the representative of workers and the middle classes that he claims to be”. Worse, insists the progressive newspaper Der Spiegel, he got “his worst electoral result since 1949”.
Oriented to the left, Die Zeit abounds: “Voters just want to keep the shop running, and they have less and less of the impression that those who govern Germany are capable of doing that.”
Reinforced preservatives
However, the German results of the European elections are not just a sanction against the government. According to the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, they also show that Friedrich Merz’s CDU strategy is working.
“The challenge for the Christian Democratic Party was to convince centrist voters, and more particularly those on the center left, who might have voted for the Greens or the Social Democrats. Because those who previously voted in the center now lean more to the right.” Merz seems to have understood it, secures the Frankfurt title. He comes out of the Europeans strengthened and will be able to face “more quietly” the regional elections this fall, in several Länder in eastern Germany.
In this part of the country, the extreme right seems “became the first political force”nuance all the same Die Zeit. And this, “despite the scandals involving Russia and China; despite the national demonstrations launched after heated discussions on a ‘remigration’ project (of foreigners and Germans of foreign origin); despite a head of the list, Maximilian Krah, ousted by the party’s own leadership due to an affair involving one of his collaborators (accused of spying for China)”.
AfD is far from defeated, confirms Der Spiegel. Even on the national level, its results are more than honorable. “For the first time in the history of the federal republic, a far-right party has become the second largest force in the country in a nationally organized election”, analyzes the weekly. Unlike small neo-Nazi parties like the NPD, the Alternative for Germany has managed to find its way “at the heart of German democracy”.
