🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[DavidB.]

I wonder if part of the story of the surge for far-right options isn't the recent success of far-right parties in other parts of the continent? The Sweden Democrats were if anything more ostracized than the AfD until 2022, but now they've entered a government and have had real influence on Kristersson's policies (or at least his rhetoric); Giorgia Meloni's party was never really ostracized in the same way, but her leading a government as Prime Minister is also sort of unprecedented. (The RN in France have not yet entered government, but in 2022 the 'republican front' clearly broke down at the voter level, with not just center-right but many centrist voters preferring the RN to left-wing candidates, which would've been unthinkable in, like, 2017.) The western European far-right had a very successful year in 2022, and so voting for an organization like the AfD must feel less unrealistic now.

In general I always tend to shy away from such "spillover" explanations, as most European voters have very little knowledge of other European countries' politics - I'd say it is first and foremost Europe-wide phenomena like high immigration and high inflation levels that affect voting patterns on a country-by country basis. But I also think German voters do know that parties to the right of the center-right have been doing well across Europe over the last year, with Meloni's win and subsequent Prime Ministership undoubtedly being by far the most prominent exponent of this.

[DL]

Germans don't have to look as far away as Italy - the neo-Nazi FPO has been doing very well in Austria for many years

[rob in cal]

With a new poll showing AFD ahead of SPD, we have a polling situation where the two leading parties are opposition parties. Seems pretty unique.

[OSR stands with Israel]

I wonder if part of the story of the surge for far-right options isn't the recent success of far-right parties in other parts of the continent? The Sweden Democrats were if anything more ostracized than the AfD until 2022, but now they've entered a government and have had real influence on Kristersson's policies (or at least his rhetoric); Giorgia Meloni's party was never really ostracized in the same way, but her leading a government as Prime Minister is also sort of unprecedented. (The RN in France have not yet entered government, but in 2022 the 'republican front' clearly broke down at the voter level, with not just center-right but many centrist voters preferring the RN to left-wing candidates, which would've been unthinkable in, like, 2017.) The western European far-right had a very successful year in 2022, and so voting for an organization like the AfD must feel less unrealistic now.

My opinion is that Merkel despite being from a Conservative Party didn’t really govern like a conservative at all and given that Merkel was Chancellor for such a long time , it made solid conservatives to become disillusioned with the CDU.

If Merkel had actually governed like a conservative (not be so left wing on refugee issues, not implement  left wing energy policies) then maybe you wouldn’t see AFD rise as much as they have .

[Middle-aged Europe]

snippidy snip

I agree with all of this but there is one big external event that has become salient since the start of 2023 that you have missed: a massive increase in asylum applications from outside of Europe.

Hidden behind the numbers of the 1.4 million Ukrainians who have come to Germany, is another 244,000 asylum seekers primarily from the Middle East, Central Asia (especially Afghanistan and Iran), and Africa. In just the first three months of 2023, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has received over 80,000 asylum applications, 78% more than the number received in the same period in 2022.

States and municipalities have been loudly sounding the alarm for the past 6 months about how it is getting increasingly difficult to manage. They lack proper housing, so more highly-visible tent and trailer accommodations have been set up for refugees. It's also putting a strain on state and municipal budgets, as not only do they have to care for, feed, and educate refugees, but they also have to dedicate more and more personnel from other departments to helping with refugees. And civil society organizations are also stretched to their limits.

In May, there was an asylum summit between the states and the federal government, where the feds provided an immediate 1 billion EUR in emergency aid, and also agreed to speed up deportations of those whose applications have been rejected, expand the number of detention days from 10 to 28, as well as new investments to modernize IT systems to speed up processing (because Germany is stuck in the 1980s for some reason). They agreed to have another summit in October 2023 after the results of results of the Common European Asylum System reforms at the EU level to determine a permanent funding solution. The fact that the federal government took so long to hold the summit certainly does not help its image.

Some estimates I have seen project some 800,000 total asylum applications in 2023 alone. There is a feeling of perpetual crisis and state and local governments have been very open about how much stress they are under and how desperate the situation is getting.

Now we see the AfD rising in frustration about not only government infighting, the PR catastrophe that was the new Building Energy Law, and now also a renewed asylum crisis. The Federal Ministry of the Interior has also reported that attacks on asylum centers, while not as high as 2015-2016, have increased by a whopping 70% in 2022 compared to 2021.

Polling shows that a supermajority of Germans do not trust any party to handle refugees and asylum seekers, so this holds both promise and danger.

This is apparently what some people care about, although I can't really say how I was ever personally affected by asylum-seekers or refugee crises in a negative manner... nor I do recall knowing people in person who have. I certainly was affected pretty hard by COVID and the subsequent lockdowns. To some extent also by last year's inflation and energy prize hikes, altough I was still in a financial position to mostly shrug it off (although I was always aware that others probably weren't). Maybe it would have been different if I had fallen to victim to one of Tender Branson's Afghan gang-bangers, but the way it played out the worst thing that ever happened to me as a result of refugee crises was receiving death threats (and subsequently reporting them to the authorities) by AfD sh**theads and having an casually racist father who muses about crime in some manner every second time he talks about brown people.

[Zinneke]

snippidy snip

I agree with all of this but there is one big external event that has become salient since the start of 2023 that you have missed: a massive increase in asylum applications from outside of Europe.

Hidden behind the numbers of the 1.4 million Ukrainians who have come to Germany, is another 244,000 asylum seekers primarily from the Middle East, Central Asia (especially Afghanistan and Iran), and Africa. In just the first three months of 2023, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has received over 80,000 asylum applications, 78% more than the number received in the same period in 2022.

States and municipalities have been loudly sounding the alarm for the past 6 months about how it is getting increasingly difficult to manage. They lack proper housing, so more highly-visible tent and trailer accommodations have been set up for refugees. It's also putting a strain on state and municipal budgets, as not only do they have to care for, feed, and educate refugees, but they also have to dedicate more and more personnel from other departments to helping with refugees. And civil society organizations are also stretched to their limits.

In May, there was an asylum summit between the states and the federal government, where the feds provided an immediate 1 billion EUR in emergency aid, and also agreed to speed up deportations of those whose applications have been rejected, expand the number of detention days from 10 to 28, as well as new investments to modernize IT systems to speed up processing (because Germany is stuck in the 1980s for some reason). They agreed to have another summit in October 2023 after the results of results of the Common European Asylum System reforms at the EU level to determine a permanent funding solution. The fact that the federal government took so long to hold the summit certainly does not help its image.

Some estimates I have seen project some 800,000 total asylum applications in 2023 alone. There is a feeling of perpetual crisis and state and local governments have been very open about how much stress they are under and how desperate the situation is getting.

Now we see the AfD rising in frustration about not only government infighting, the PR catastrophe that was the new Building Energy Law, and now also a renewed asylum crisis. The Federal Ministry of the Interior has also reported that attacks on asylum centers, while not as high as 2015-2016, have increased by a whopping 70% in 2022 compared to 2021.

Polling shows that a supermajority of Germans do not trust any party to handle refugees and asylum seekers, so this holds both promise and danger.

This is apparently what some people care about, although I can't really say how I was ever personally affected by asylum-seekers or refugee crises in a negative manner... nor I do recall knowing people in person who have. I certainly was affected pretty hard by COVID and the subsequent lockdowns. To some extent also by last year's inflation and energy prize hikes, altough I was still in a financial position to mostly shrug it off (although I was always aware that others probably weren't). Maybe it would have been different if I had fallen to victim to one of Tender Branson's Afghan gang-bangers, but the way it played out the worst thing that ever happened to me as a result of refugee crises was receiving death threats (and subsequently reporting them to the authorities) by AfD sh**theads and having an casually racist father who muses about crime in some manner every second time he talks about brown people.

I really don't think there is any excuse for voting AfD, however, you can not be directly affected by immigrants yet still hold the perfectly sane belief that accepting 800,000 asylum seekers, all while oil Sheiks who pay hookers 100k to have a sh*t on them in the Gulf have accepted zero Syrians or Afghans, is simply beyond the modern European state capacity's level of acceptability.

I actually think if Europe wasn't governed by such narrow conservative interest groups and a sense of the squeakiest wheels getting the most attention, we would be able to, as a continent, deal with immigration more effectively, but instead big cities in countries with more tolerant asylum policies like Germany are the ones to have to deal with the equivalent of a new big city's population joining them, and that results in the perception that these places are dysfunctional messes. Covid has also not helped in terms of homelessness and mental health problems, and the first victims are often asylum seekers or undocumented migrants (here in Brussels at least) - there is simply no more capacity and both the migrants themselves and the provincial areas that vote extremes do not want newcomers to settle in their village or small town. Even Ukrainians who are given housing in a nice Walloon village end up wanting to be in either Brussels or Antwerp and think the village is beneath them. It's a wicked cycle and eventually even nominally pro-immigration people end up frustrated - I count myself among them, without ever bringing myself to vote for any far right party.

Sort these issues out at a Europe-wide level, get some elements of society to pull their weight as opposed to Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne-like cities all the time, and fix our territorial policies and population distributions in the process. You may see AfD lose a good 5-10% of protest voters and left with just their bona fide racists.

[President Johnson]

I wonder if part of the story of the surge for far-right options isn't the recent success of far-right parties in other parts of the continent? The Sweden Democrats were if anything more ostracized than the AfD until 2022, but now they've entered a government and have had real influence on Kristersson's policies (or at least his rhetoric); Giorgia Meloni's party was never really ostracized in the same way, but her leading a government as Prime Minister is also sort of unprecedented. (The RN in France have not yet entered government, but in 2022 the 'republican front' clearly broke down at the voter level, with not just center-right but many centrist voters preferring the RN to left-wing candidates, which would've been unthinkable in, like, 2017.) The western European far-right had a very successful year in 2022, and so voting for an organization like the AfD must feel less unrealistic now.

My opinion is that Merkel despite being from a Conservative Party didn’t really govern like a conservative at all and given that Merkel was Chancellor for such a long time , it made solid conservatives to become disillusioned with the CDU.

If Merkel had actually governed like a conservative (not be so left wing on refugee issues, not implement  left wing energy policies) then maybe you wouldn’t see AFD rise as much as they have .

The moderation though was a key factor in Merkel's electoral successes. She won the CDU more votes in the middle than she lost on the right. Also keep in mind that Merkel governed for three out of four terms with the SPD as coalition partner, so she couldn't move too far right. The CDU as whole went along with that and allowed the SPD to set at least 50% of the agenda (mostly popular items such as the minimum wage) as long as it guaranteed electoral success. And unlike the SPD, CDU is much less interested in political debate and issues. There's a reason the party has long been called "Kanzlerwahlverein" ("chancellor election club"), because after all CDU more cares about holding power than implementing certain policies. Merkel then associated herself with the SPD's popular policies than and a lot of center or even center-left voters went for her.

The one term she governed with the FDP, from 2009 to 2013, was overshadowed by internal conflicts. The FDP was largely blamed after that and ultimately got blown out in 2013, didn't reach the 5% threshold anymore, while Merkel won big.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

This is apparently what some people care about, although I can't really say how I was ever personally affected by asylum-seekers or refugee crises in a negative manner... nor I do recall knowing people in person who have. I certainly was affected pretty hard by COVID and the subsequent lockdowns. To some extent also by last year's inflation and energy prize hikes, altough I was still in a financial position to mostly shrug it off (although I was always aware that others probably weren't). Maybe it would have been different if I had fallen to victim to one of Tender Branson's Afghan gang-bangers, but the way it played out the worst thing that ever happened to me as a result of refugee crises was receiving death threats (and subsequently reporting them to the authorities) by AfD sh**theads and having an casually racist father who muses about crime in some manner every second time he talks about brown people.

I agree with you on all of this, but it's easy to paint them as a threat (especially when it's become so high-visibility regarding the tents/container camps that have sprung up), either in terms of crime or if your municipal council is complaining about tight funds and the federal government is slow to respond and help out.

Per ARD, 77% believe that politicians care too little about the problems created by refugees, which is a question that can be interpreted in many, many ways (like for me, the refugee thing just feeds into my angst about housing, which is why we need to completely build over Tempelhofer Feld, which is anything but a AfD-friendly position to take).

And migration/refugees has rocketed up to a Top 3 issue amongst voters:

[LAKISYLVANIA]

21% for AFD

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1675929481251266562

[Continential]

Could the AfD be banned anytime soon?

[DL]

21% for AFD

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1675929481251266562

If this was the actual result of an election its not clear that even a "grand coalition" of CDU and SPD would have a majority - let alone a Black/Green coalition. Has there been any talk of a CDU/SPD/Green three way coalition down the road or maybe CDU/SPD/FDP?

Its a bit odd that in the current environment the CDU is able to capitalize at all and only the AfD among opposition parties seems to be gaining ground

[LAKISYLVANIA]

Right now these are projection of the seats (by constituency).

Wahlkreisprognose 26 june

Union: 139 (-4)
SPD: 82 (-39)
Grüne: 19 (+3)
AFD: 57 (+41)
Linke: 2 (-1)
FDP: 0 (same)

election.de 23 june

Union: 189 (+46)
SPD: 48 (-73)
Grüne: 16 (same)
AFD: 43 (+27)
Linke: 3 (same)
FDP: 0 (same)

INSA is even more optimistic for Union.

acc to election.de's last poll

AfD:
Safe: 7 (+6)
Likely: 22 (+13)
Lean: 14 (+5)

SPD down from 30 safe seats to 2 safe seats and down to 18 likely seats (from 59).
Union up from 28 to 78 safe seats.

299 seats are awarded by FPTP constituencies. The others (about 300) through state lists. I think based on that Grand Union at this point still remains possible. CDU-FDP-Grüne probably too.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

AfD getting close in some states





But these are for state elections

[Middle-aged Europe]

Could the AfD be banned anytime soon?

Not a chance, especially since the Constitutional Court had refused to ban the even more extreme NPD... twice.

[Estrella]

Could the AfD be banned anytime soon?

Not a chance, especially since the Constitutional Court had refused to ban the even more extreme NPD... twice.

Was "they have more Verfassungsschutz agents than genuine members" (or something along those lines) just an exaggeration/meme, or the actual reason for NPD remaning legal?

[Middle-aged Europe]

Could the AfD be banned anytime soon?

Not a chance, especially since the Constitutional Court had refused to ban the even more extreme NPD... twice.

Was "they have more Verfassungsschutz agents than genuine members" (or something along those lines) just an exaggeration/meme, or the actual reason for NPD remaning legal?

This was the first time around... the second time it was about the NPD being too insignificant to pose an actual threat.

[jaichind]

If you split out CDU and CSU then AfD is now the #1 party

[Death of a Salesman]

https://twitter.com/Wahlen_DE/status/1676456673173487616

34% for AfD, 30% for RR, 5% for Green. If the Greens slip even a bit, the CDU will need to choose between voting for Linke and letting Bjorn Hocke win.

[CumbrianLefty]

If you split out CDU and CSU then AfD is now the #1 party

In other words, they still aren't in any meaningful sense?

[DL]

https://twitter.com/Wahlen_DE/status/1676456673173487616

34% for AfD, 30% for RR, 5% for Green. If the Greens slip even a bit, the CDU will need to choose between voting for Linke and letting Bjorn Hocke win.

Why has Linke lost so much ground in Thuringen since the last election. They took over 30% in 2019

[Helsinkian]

If you split out CDU and CSU then AfD is now the #1 party

In other words, they still aren't in any meaningful sense?

Doesn't the proposed new election law establish a hard 5% threshold, i.e., one which can no longer be be bypassed by winning three direct mandates? It it becomes reality, then it definitely matters a lot what the CSU vote portion is.

[JimJamUK]

Why has Linke lost so much ground in Thuringen since the last election. They took over 30% in 2019

Most state polling tends to look quite a lot like national polling and only properly reflects the popularity of state governments as the election approaches, and Die Linke are of course polling poorly on a national level. How much they can claw back won’t become clear until over a year from now.

[Red Velvet]

A Trump return in the US + Macron and Scholz being so deeply unpopular in their countries that Marine Le Pen and AfD become the top leading political forces in their countries and are greatly positioned for the next elections?

It almost feels like the far-right wave during 2nd half of the 2010s was a tide in Europe in comparison to what could come next.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Would AFD be doing better or worse if they remained basically a German version of UKIP

[palandio]

Why has Linke lost so much ground in Thuringen since the last election. They took over 30% in 2019

Most state polling tends to look quite a lot like national polling and only properly reflects the popularity of state governments as the election approaches, and Die Linke are of course polling poorly on a national level. How much they can claw back won’t become clear until over a year from now.

And there is now a swing voter segment of ca. 15% in the Eastern states that in the run-up to a state election goes to whichever party is most likely to beat the AfD, usually the governor‘s party. Conditions are probably that the governor is reasonably popular and that there is a fair chance of beating the AfD.