Germany Goes Right, But Averts The Worst

German Election Shows Working Class Drift Right Is Not A Uniquely American Problem

Europe’s largest democracy went to the polls this past weekend to elect a new government.

The election was called after the collapse of Olaf Scholz's center-left government. Scholz, who took power as chancellor after his Social Democratic Party won the 2021 election at the end of Angela Merkel’s 16-year tenure, was besotted by two problems that hampered world governments during or after the COVID-19 Pandemic: inflation, made worse by Germany’s dependence on Russia for energy needs, disrupted by the War in Ukraine, and mass immigration.

Germany has a confusing electoral system. Candidates are elected to the Bundestag—Germany’s lower house of parliament—in one of two ways. Voters elect a member to represent a constituency like Americans would elect a member of Congress from a district. They also elect members in a second vote via “party lists,” where, in addition to picking your representative, you also choose a party you’d like to see have further representation in the legislature and candidates a party places on a general list get seats depending on the percentage of the vote the party receives.

THE RESULTS

The center-right Christian Democratic Union and its allies in Bavaria, the Christian Social Union, won the most votes, finishing with about 29 percent of the vote. It marks a return to power for the CDU/CSU, which governed Germany under Merkel before being ousted in 2021. The party will likely form a grand coalition with Scholz’s losing party, SPD, which fell to third place, getting about 16 percent of the vote. It was the first time the SPD received less than 20 percent of the vote since 1933 when Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party won a mandate they used to install the Third Reich¹. Scholz’s coalition partners, the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party, whose exit from the government in November caused Scholz’s government to collapse and new elections to be called, also lost seats. FDP was wiped out of parliament completely, losing all 91 seats as they failed to reach the five percent threshold for the party list and failed to win a single constituency.

CDU/CSU won every Bavaria seat, including those in Munich and Nuremberg. CSU flipped a key Green-held seat in Munich’s south side, which had been key to Scholz’s coalition victory in 2021. CDU flipped dozens of SPD seats in Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, and Rhineland-Palatinate, where SPD did remarkably well in 2021. CDU flipped two seats in Frankfurt, one from the Greens and one from the SPD, sweeping the first-round vote in Germany’s financial center.

The far-right Alternative For Deutschland, commonly described as a modern-day Nazi party, had many political observers frightened and intrigued as their poll numbers launched them into second place from the fifth-place finish they achieved in 2021. AFD finished just below the recent polls' average. They peaked at about 23 percent in January. Their momentum was stunted last month, perhaps due to the party's endorsement from Elon Musk and American Vice President J.D. Vance, which was controversial in Germany. AFD’s leader, Alice Wendel, has been politically close to Donald Trump since she became party co-leader in 2017.

When AFD first came on the scene, running as a staunchly anti-immigrant party, their support was limited to only the German state of Saxony, specifically in Dresden and along the border with Poland and Czechia. Over time, AFD expanded their base eastward into Thuringia, which they won in 2021. On Sunday, AFD expanded their support even more, winning the states of Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, all of which were SPD strongholds in previous elections and won by that party in 2021. Why is this important? The five German states won by AFD covered the territory of what was once the German Democratic Republic – or communist East Germany – before the country was reunited at the end of the Cold War in 1991. The states that made up the former West Germany all voted for the SPD or the CDU.

Owing to its support being primarily rural, AFD won only 42 constituencies – all in the east. More than half of AFD’s 152 members will come from the second-round party list vote, mainly because the winning CDU did not perform as well in that vote, and AFD was able to win significant support from voters in western Germany who voted for SPD or CDU in the first round constituency vote.

The SPD, meanwhile, held on to its base in Lower Saxony and cities like Hamburg, Hanover, and Cologne. However, like other center-left parties that have faced defeat this decade, it lost voters to both the left and the right. Much of its urban base went to far-left parties like the Greens and Die Linke, or the Left. SPD’s most rural and suburban supporters defected to the CDU or, especially in the former East German states, the AFD.

The Green Party, which held a prominent place in Scholz’s government, held on to much of its urban base in the west, keeping their seats in Stuttgart, Munster, and Cologne, where they took some support from the SPD. They picked up the Baltic port city of Kiel from the SPD. However, they lost a key seat in the historic Palatine capital of Heidelberg.

Die Linke won six constituencies, all in former East German territory—four in Berlin, the other two in Leipzig in Saxony, and the college town of Erfurt, Thuringia. However, they failed to break through in rural working-class areas and small cities as they had hoped. Die Linke targeted the constituency in Rostock, Germany’s largest Baltic Sea port, and ran its former leader, Dietmar Bartsch, but it fell significantly short of AFD.

Sunday’s election results, left, and a map of Germany before reunification. AFD’s strongest performance perfectly aligned with the part of the country that was Communist East Germany before 1991.

THE WORKING CLASS RIGHT

Like in the United States, the rural working class in Germany is shifting far right at lightning speed. Unlike in the United States, these voters have another progressive option besides the SPD: Die Linke. However, Die Linke finished way behind the SPD and CDU in much of rural and working-class Germany.

This happened in the Rhine-Ruhr region in Western Germany, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s “Rust Belt.” An industrial and manufacturing stronghold since it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century², it is a longtime SPD stronghold. While the party did its best here Sunday, there was a massive drop off in support, much of which went to the AFD. The far-right party got over 20 percent of the vote in some key parts of the region, including in Duisburg and Essen, both big steel-producing and manufacturing cities similar to the often-talked-about Obama-Trump places in Eastern Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and suburban Detroit. Die Linke meanwhile finished way behind, in fourth and fifth place in most constituencies, and was only able to score higher than 10 percent in the major urban areas. Even in Cologne, the region’s largest city and a known liberal bastion³, Die Linke trailed AFD, though the ruling parties, SPD and Greens, held on there.

AFD also saw tremendous gains in the Saarland and Palatinate areas along the French border. This region is known for its coal and fossil fuel production and has one of the highest poverty rates in the country. It has recently become home to thousands of Syrian and Turkish immigrants.

In the decades since reunification, the Western “Rust Belt” region has also lost many manufacturing jobs and government funding to the eastern states. The government focused heavily on rebuilding the devastated economy in the east, which was left in tatters by decades of communist mismanagement. This has caused resentment among SPD’s Western German supporters. The reallocation of European Union structural funds to newer EU members in Eastern Europe, also left economically destitute by Communism, turned many working-class Germans in this region against the EU. A similar dynamic triggered far-right strength in other Western European countries. It sparked strong support for Brexit in the industrial parts of Northern England and helped boost French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in working-class Northeastern France. It also destroyed left-wing support in Italy’s Po Valley and Campania region, helping elect right-wing leaders like Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni. Before the poorer eastern European countries entered the EU, these regions benefitted greatly from the EU structural funds scheme.

Ironically, the ongoing battle between balancing the needs of the working class in former West Germany and those left behind by communism in Eastern Germany has been a boon to the far-right AFD in both places.

Like in America, immigration played a significant role in AFD’s rise. The new party got its first boost of support after a series of sex assaults across Germany, notably in Cologne, on New Year’s Eve 2015 committed by immigrants and asylum seekers from North Africa and the Middle East. That was followed by a series of terror attacks and foiled plots in Germany in 2016, culminating in a deadly truck attack on Berlin’s Christmas market and the murder of Maria Ladenburger by a refugee in Southern Germany. AFD won their first seats in the Bundestag in the next year’s election.

Germany’s asylum-seeker problem, stemming from Syrian and Libyan refugees fleeing to Europe during and after the Arab Spring revolutions in the early 2010s, gave the AFD an issue to build on. The opposition to mandates placed on Germans during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the recent war in Ukraine, which strangled Germany’s energy supply from Russia, further boosted the AFD. This allowed the AFD to cast an even wider net, winning support from recalcitrant Germans angry at the political establishment.

THE OTHER “FAR LEFT” PARTY

Some of AFD’s expected support fell to a new socially conservative, anti-immigrant left-wing party that split from Die Linke last year. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW, was formed by Sahra Wagenknecht, a Bundestag member, and daughter of an Iranian immigrant raised in Communist East Berlin and elected on Die Linke’s list in 2021. The party focused on Communist economic ideas but held far-right views on immigration and transgender rights. Wagenknecht's party opposed vaccine mandates and called for the dissolution of NATO. Despite its anti-migrant stances, Wagenknecht’s party includes Amira Mohamed Ali, the daughter of an Egyptian immigrant and Yemeni-German Ali Al-Dailami, born in Sanaa, Yemen. Both served in the Bundestag as Die Linke party members until they split with them last year.

Although BSW did not win enough seats to enter parliament, it outperformed Die Linke in many eastern German working-class areas along the River Spree in Brandenburg and Saxony.

The strength of the AFD and BSW in these rural working-class parts of eastern Germany echoes what’s happening in other countries, including the United States, where rural working-class citizens prioritize social and cultural issues and are only open to left-wing economic policies when they come alongside extreme social conservatism.

WHAT HAPPENS NOW?

The CDU/CSU will almost certainly form a government under Frederic Merz, the CDU leader, who will be the next chancellor of Germany. Merz is a traditional conservative who is highly pro-NATO and pro-EU and has been very critical of Trump, comparing him and his governing style to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He strongly supports Ukraine in the war.

If Merz forms a government, which is expected, AFD will be the official opposition party in the Bundestag, the first time for a far-right party since the Nazis in the early 1930s. What Merz’s coalition looks like is still in question. CDU/CSU’s 208 seats are well below the 316 needed to form a majority government, but if CDU/CSU forms a “grand coalition” with SPD, their combined force would clear that number and be able to create a government with any other party. That’s likely to happen, but if Merz fails to form a government by some chance, AFD’s leader Wendel could be invited to form one. However, none of the major parties have expressed interest in having AFD in their coalition or being part of one with them. It is likely Merz will talk Scholz’s party into forming a coalition to avoid another election and the risk of further AFD political momentum.

Nevertheless, it also means Merz’s coalition will only have a 12-seat majority and include several center-left members from the SPD, especially in the working-class Rhine-Ruhr region and in liberal cities like Hamburg and Cologne. It could end up being an even more shaky coalition than Scholz had.

1. We all know what happened next.

2. Karl Marx was born and raised in Trier, the Rhineland, before studying in eastern Germany. His Communist Manifesto was based on his expereinces growing up in the region.

3. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: Cologne, where I spent New Year’s Eve in 2014, prides itself on being the only city in Germany to never support the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. After the war, its mayor, Konrad Adenauer, became West Germany’s first post-war leader. Exactly a year after I was there, more than 1,000 sexual assaults on women during New Year’s Eve celebrations, perpetrated by North African and Muslim men, shook the city’s liberal identity to the core.