A bad night for the AfD
Analysing the election in Saxony-Anhalt
Dear Reader,
The CDU have won a surprisingly convincing electoral victory in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The conservative party were already the major power in the rural state and have been for the past two decades. Nonetheless, the size of their victory surprised most analysts since some polling had predicted a shock win for the AfD.
Under state leader Reiner Haseloff, the CDU won 37.1 percent of the vote on Sunday. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany came in second on 20.8%, while the left-wing Linke were way back in third on 11.0 percent.
The Social Democrats suffered another humiliating evening. In a state in which they ruled at the turn of the millennium with over 35% of the vote, they could only muster an 8.4% vote share.
The Greens also had to swallow a sobering result. Hoping to profit from media hype around their new national leader, they barely made it into the parliament, scraping past the 5% threshold with 5.9% of the vote.
Why did the CDU win so convincingly?
German commentators love the word Landesvater, which is used to describe a politician who has won people’s trust through years of steady leadership. In Baden-Württemberg, elderly Green leader Winfried Kretschamnn has earned himself just such a tag based on three election victories. He ran his campaign this March on the simple slogan Sie kennen mich (you know me).
Haseloff’s third victory means that he too has been raised to their rarefied realm of the Landesväter. A slightly dour chap who rarely smiles, he somehow has won the hearts of Saxonians of the Anhalter variety who, polling shows, voted for him rather than the CDU. The same polling done by ARD shows that voters see him as standing up for the interests of east Germans inside his own party.
Another possible explanation for the comfortable win is that voters rallied around the CDU to ensure that they didn’t suffer the “shame” of being the first state in which the AfD won the largest vote share. Haseloff told an anecdote during his victory speech about a woman who came to him earlier in the day and said “you need to win, otherwise we in Saxony-Anhalt will be the black sheep.”
What happens now?
In state capital Magdeburg, the CDU have been the main party in a coalition with the SPD and Greens for the past five years. Their improved vote share of 7.3% gives them enough seats (40) to be able to say bye bye to the Greens and form a slim coalition with the SPD.
But Haseloff could also decide to continue the current coalition, or bring the Free Democrats into the fold in combination with either of the SPD and the Greens. In other words he has a lot of options.
While there is programmatic overlap between the CDU and the AfD on emotionally charged issues such as the public broadcasting fee, the CDU won’t talk with the populist party, a move that is both tactical and principled.
Does this vote matter at the federal level?
After suffering humiliating defeats in March at state elections in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz, the CDU will be given a boost by this vote, which steadies the ship for beleaguered leader and Chancellor hopeful Armin Laschet.
The CDU will be doubly delighted by the fact that the Greens barely managed to improve on their 2016 vote share.
At the same time, individual state results can be misleading if taken as a reflection of the national mood. If that were the case, the result from Rheinland-Pfalz in March would suggest the SPD are going to charge to victory in September. The reality is that in the Superwahljahr we’ve had three elections and the scores have been an even split between the SPD; Greens and CDU.
A hesitant conclusion is that the AfD are here to stay as a force in east German politics, but middle income and urban voters are likely to keep rallying around the biggest centrist party to avoid the indignity that would result from an AfD victory.
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What else has been happening?
Green chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock has had to “adapt” parts of her CV after she was caught embellishing her credentials. Specifically, her “membership” of the UNHCR turned out to be financial donations made over several years. Meanwhile, her membership of the German Marshall Fund was “adapted” to make clear she took part in an exchange programme with the US-German think tank but isn’t an active member. While getting creative with one’s CV is a crime about as common as riding schwarz on the U-Bahn, it doesn’t look good for the leader of a party already often seen as scheinheilig. It also comes on the back of Baerbock “forgetting” to declare a Christmas bonus of €25,000 from the Greens as a second income to the Bundestag. As the negative headlines about the fresh-faced environmentalist accumulate, the polling surge that came after her nomination has started to ebb.
Christian Drosten has come up with another theory for where the origin of the coronavirus is to be found. After saying last year that he thought raccoons could be the source, Germany’s top virologist has now identified the Chinese fur industry as a possible culprit. “I have absolutely no proof for this other than the clearly established origin of SARS 1,” he admitted to Swiss magazine Republik. This is the same Dr. Drsoten who warned fellow virologists last year not to indulge in conjecture about where the virus came from. But, while other explanations are ignored by the German press because Dr. Drosten has labelled them conspiracy theories, his own ponderings are reprinted across the board. In case you were wondering, he still hasn’t answered our press inquiry about which Chinese scientists tipped him off about the emergence of a new virus in 2019 before even the WHO were informed. Was it a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with whom he collaborated on a research paper on manipulated coronaviruses back in 2015? We may never know.
Cardinal Marx has asked the Pope to release him from his duties as archbishop of Munich and Freising, one of the most senior posts in Germany’s Catholic Church. Marx said in his letter to the Vatican that church members had suffered “a catastrophe” of sexual abuse in recent decades and that the church had done too little to address the institutional failings that had allowed it to happen. The curious thing about the resignation is that it came from an archbishop who was under no pressure to go - in stark opposition to the archbishop Rainer Woelki of Cologne Cathedral, who tried to stop the publication of a critical report on sexual abuse in his diocese. Reformers in the church hope that Marx’s resignation will give impetus to a new movement called the Synodaler Weg that calls for a more prominent role for women and even questions the appropriateness of celibacy to the modern priesthood. Coming just weeks after priests blessed gay couples in rebellion against Rome, Marx’s resignation promises interesting times ahead for the Church.
J.L.