Germany's far-right AfD has won its first regional election, taking between 30.5 and 33.5 percent of the vote in the former East German state of Thuringia, exit polls showed on Sunday.
This is the same state where in the last elections (2019) because the Die Linke, SPD, Green governing coalition lost their majority the local CDU made a deal with the AFD and FDP to get them to vote for the CDU head of government (which implies that the AfD would be included in governing since their votes would be needed), only to have Merkel herself shut the thing down and the local government went back to the former coalition
In 2019 Die Linke won the most votes with 31% and the head of government was from the party, this was THEIR bastion. Now Die Linke split and exit polls show the party which came from the split, BSW, in 3rd place with 15%, Die Linke (again, the former ruling party) with 13% and SPD with 6%. Greens ate shit with 3.5%.
In Saxony, which just happened too, AFD got second place probably within 1-2 percentage points of the CDU, BSW got 3rd with 12% and Die Linke got 4%.
So obviously strong showing from the AFD but nothing close to the majority they need to govern alone, and every party still says that they won’t work with the AfD, but the arithmetic is getting crazy enough that you might need to have government coalitions that include every party EXCEPT the AFD, which who knows how that may go and AFAIK some parties also say that they won’t work with the BSW.
And this is while a lot of people speculated that the BSW would shave away conservative voters from the AFD, if we assume that actually happened (although in Thuringia DieLinke + BSW got 28% which is less than what they had before) it gets even worse.
Honestly despite all the pearl clutching that “the fascists are coming” and “democracy is in danger” or whatever the fuck, you can only say “not these guys, these guys are unacceptable” while shit keeps getting worse and worse for so long until you start to have a substantial amount of the electorate start thinking “hmm those guys you keep not letting into power? maybe let’s try them out can’t get any worse”, I heard that in Germany this USED to benefit Die Linke since they used to be the “ooooooh scary don’t vote for them” protest vote, but the AfD has taken that spot.
Very much agree, and in my opinion European left collectively shat the bed at the start of the war by allying with the libs. This left the right as the only parties pointing out the obvious fact that the war is bad for Europe. Now that everybody can see that Europe has been devastated economically as a result a lot of people are naturally turning to the parties that took the rational stance on the war.
As I’m in portugal where the left HAS opposed the war, with the communist party opposing even arms shipments to ukraine, and generally speaking got punished for it, I can’t say that europe-wide opposing the war gets you much electoral success, but certainly germans seem less inclined to support the war than portuguese people so I agree with you that it was a wasted opportunity there.
Some notes about this:
Honestly despite all the pearl clutching that “the fascists are coming” and “democracy is in danger” or whatever the fuck, you can only say “not these guys, these guys are unacceptable” while shit keeps getting worse and worse for so long until you start to have a substantial amount of the electorate start thinking “hmm those guys you keep not letting into power? maybe let’s try them out can’t get any worse”, I heard that in Germany this USED to benefit Die Linke since they used to be the “ooooooh scary don’t vote for them” protest vote, but the AfD has taken that spot.
Very much agree, and in my opinion European left collectively shat the bed at the start of the war by allying with the libs. This left the right as the only parties pointing out the obvious fact that the war is bad for Europe. Now that everybody can see that Europe has been devastated economically as a result a lot of people are naturally turning to the parties that took the rational stance on the war.
As I’m in portugal where the left HAS opposed the war, with the communist party opposing even arms shipments to ukraine, and generally speaking got punished for it, I can’t say that europe-wide opposing the war gets you much electoral success, but certainly germans seem less inclined to support the war than portuguese people so I agree with you that it was a wasted opportunity there.
Yeah, I guess it depends on where you are in Europe. In Slovakia, the left won the election on opposing the war.
there was no chance of the european left not allying with liberals, because they are liberals.
all the european so-called leftist socdem parties revealed their true neolib colors by the 90s at the latest.
Pretty much yeah, and now they’ve been exposed for what they are. Hopefully, this will create space for the actual left to asset itself once again.
Die Linke cast away most of the radicalism to ally with the “political center”. They had peak results during the 2008 crisis mind you.