Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar:
No need to get ahead of ourselves: it will still be a few years before the AfD takes power. In the five German state elections held this year, while they were the only party to increase their vote across the board, the AfD failed to secure an absolute majority anywhere. Across all five elections, the party averaged 27.3 percent. Its highest result – 43.8 percent in Saxony-Anhalt – was more than two and a half times its lowest, 16.3 percent in Berlin. Its biggest gains were in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern – states with relatively small electorates (1.7 million and 1.3 million respectively, in a nation with 60.5 million eligible voters), and in which Chancellor Merz’s CDU performed particularly badly. It is hard to believe that so many CDU voters in these two eastern regions could have turned into neo-Nazis over the past five years.
In any case, there were other trends at work in these elections, beyond the rise of the AfD. Regional factors played a role – specifically, the relative position of incumbent state premiers (weak in Saxony-Anhalt and Berlin, strong in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania). The Greens stagnated, suffering losses in three of the five states; the CDU made gains – albeit modest ones – in the two western states (in Baden-Württemberg, with its 7.7 million eligible voters, they came within a hair’s breadth of winning, and in Rhineland-Palatinate, with 2.9 million eligible voters, they actually won); while Die Linke increased its vote in three of the five elections: in the two western states and, above all, in Berlin (2.5 million eligible voters), where it finished nearly ten percentage points ahead of the AfD.
For the SPD, this election year was a disaster.
More here.
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