With a portrait of party leader Sara Wagenknecht and the slogan ‘ War or Peace’ the new founded German party Alliance Sarah Wagenknecht campaigning for votes for the European Parliament on a campaign poster in Berlin, Germany on May 30, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

An unpopular government with a reputation for constant infighting. An economy stuck in a rut. A strong far-right party that has been embarrassed by its leading candidate and alienated its European allies. And a mainstream opposition still working on its recovery.

German politics are in a disgruntled, volatile state as the country’s voters prepare to fill 96 of the 720 seats at the European Parliament on June 9, the biggest single national contingent in the 27-nation European Union.

It’s the first nationwide vote since center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz took power in late 2021, ending the 16-year reign of center-right predecessor Angela Merkel. Her era was marked by often consensual politics and a string of “grand coalition” governments between the traditional major parties of right and left.

That cosiness, already tested during Ms. Merkel’s time by a series of crises and the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany(AfD), is well and truly over.

“This European election is taking place in the context of an economic crisis, but also a government crisis, because the government … really has very low popularity ratings,” said Johannes Hillje, a Berlin-based political consultant. Voters are likely to use the vote to signal their discontent, he added.

Mr. Scholz says that “confidence is … the best remedy against extremism” in turbulent times. But his government hasn’t generated much confidence.

The Social Democrat’s coalition with the environmentalist Greens and pro-business Free Democrats has achievements to its name. Those include preventing an energy crunch after Russia cut off its gas supplies to Germany, extensive aid for Ukraine — though details of that have caused friction — and a series of socially liberal reforms.

But the overwhelming impression of a government that set out to modernize Germany has been one of constant discord, as the economy, Europe’s biggest, struggles to generate growth.

The coalition infighting hasn’t taken a break for the election. The partners are arguing about how to put together a 2025 budget while adhering to Germany’s tight self-imposed rules on running up debt. That quandary already forced a hasty, court-mandated rehash of the 2024 budget, complete with subsidy cuts that prompted protests by farmers.

Opposition leader Friedrich Merz told parliament earlier this year that the government is “governing against the majority of voters and the population in Germany.” He lamented that the mood was “full of doubt and uncertainty.”

Mr. Merz has sought to give his party, once led by the centrist Ms. Merkel, a sharper conservative profile since he took over after its 2021 election defeat.

His Union bloc has benefited only partly from the unpopularity of Mr. Scholz and his coalition; while surveys have given it a clear lead, it’s struggling to get its support above an unspectacular 30% of the vote. There are questions over how much the 68-year-old Mr. Merz, a one-time rival of Ms. Merkel with no government experience, appeals to voters.

It’s not yet clear who will challenge Mr. Scholz in a national election expected in the fall of 2025. The Union plans to decide after three state elections in September in Germany’s former communist east.

The European Parliament vote and those state votes in three strongholds will test AfD, which fed on widespread discontent to garner support of more than 20% for a while.

A series of recent setbacks appears to have pushed it down somewhat. First came a media report in January that extremists met to discuss the deportation of millions of immigrants, including some with German citizenship, and that some figures from the party attended. The report triggered mass protests against the rise of the far-right.

Last month, an assistant to Maximilian Krah, AfD’s top candidate in the European election, was arrested on suspicion of spying for China. Its No. 2 candidate, Petr Bystron, faces an investigation after denying allegations he may have received money from a pro-Russia network. The party already faced criticism for having Russia-friendly positions.

AfD then banned Mr. Krah from making campaign appearances after he told an Italian newspaper that not all members of the Nazis’ elite SS unit were war criminals. That wasn’t enough to prevent the party being kicked out of the hard-right Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament.

Separately, a court ruled that one of AfD’s best-known figures, Björn Höcke, knowingly used a Nazi slogan in a 2021 speech and fined him.

“Instead of being able to speak about its own position, it has to comment on scandals and allegations in the media every week,” Mr. Hillje said. AfD’s solid core of voters won’t be put off, but “those who aren’t entirely sure whether they should vote AfD could rethink as a result of these scandals and allegations.”

AfD still looks set to make gains from the 11% of the vote it took in the 2019 European Parliament election, though perhaps not as many as it hoped.

Some observers believe a new party founded by prominent opposition politician Sahra Wagenknecht, which combines left-wing economic policy with a restrictive approach to migration and other positions with potential appeal to some AfD voters, might dent its support.

Around 60.9 million German citizens are eligible to vote, along with 4.1 million residents from other EU countries who can decide whether to vote in Germany or their country of origin.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
| Photo Credit: AFP

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s beleaguered coalition was counting the cost on October 9 of heavy losses at two State elections halfway into its term, which also saw the far right make strong gains.

All three parties in the coalition— Mr. Scholz’s centre-left SPD, the Greens and the liberal FDP— saw support fall on October 8 in the southern region of Bavaria, the country’s biggest State, and Hesse in the west.

The main conservative opposition won in both polls, as expected, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained more ground, causing fresh concern about their growing appeal.

Nearly 14 million people were eligible to vote in the States, almost one in five of Germany’s electorate. The polls were seen as a crucial indicator of the population’s mood, with surging immigration and economic woes among key topics.

“It is clear who won the vote: populism,” said news weekly Der Spiegel while the top-selling Bild said a whopping 80 percent of Sunday’s voters were calling for a change in migration policy, citing polling institute Infratest dimap.

Two years after coming to power, the polls were a kind of “interim report card” for Mr. Scholz’s coalition, Der Spiegel said.

“The results are disastrous,” it went on. “The coalition needs a reset if it wants to be re-elected in two years.”

For the anti-immigration AfD, the votes were the latest sign of growing momentum and showed their appeal was extending beyond their traditional strongholds in the ex-communist east.

The elections came after a torrid two years for Scholz’s government, which has had to contend with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an ensuing energy crisis that plunged Germany into recession.

Adding to the problems, the chancellor’s coalition has been consumed by bitter infighting on issues ranging from climate laws to spending cuts.

However, Mr. Scholz’s spokesman Steffen Hebestreit sought to play down the vote setbacks, saying the government was on course to tackle the most pressing issues facing the country.

“The Chancellor is convinced that the government is doing a good job, that it has the right positions and is charting the right course for the longer term,” he told reporters.

Not helping the cause of the SPD and its coalition partners, both states are conservative strongholds. Hesse had been ruled for 24 years by the main opposition CDU and Bavaria since 1957 by the CSU, headed by Markus Soeder.

The SPD had sought to gain ground in Hesse by fielding a heavyweight to run for state premier, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser.

But the party won just 15% of the vote, almost five percentage points below its last result in 2018.

The CDU maintained its first place in Hesse and extended its lead by over seven points to 34.6%.

State premier Boris Rhein is thus set to retain his job, while Ms. Faeser is left facing questions about her political future.

SPD party leader Saskia Esken said the poor showing underlined that the government in Berlin must speed up its response on migration in particular.

“We have got to seal migration agreements with the main countries of origin now,” she told public broadcaster ARD.

The AfD looked to have gained about five percentage points in both Bavaria and Hesse, building on recent local poll wins, although the mainstreams parties have ruled out cooperation with it in government.

Immigration was a central theme at the polls as Germany— like elsewhere in Europe— faces a surge of new arrivals, reviving memories of a major influx in 2015.

The victory of the CSU— the sister party of the CDU— in Bavaria was widely expected and State Premier Mr. Soeder will retain his post.

But with vote projections showing the party’s worst result for decades, it could deal a blow to his ambitions to one day stand as a Chancellor candidate.

Nordhausen, Germany:

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Sunday lost a tight mayoral race where the party had been tipped to secure the office of city mayor for the first time. 

The AfD’s candidate Joerg Prophet was defeated by independent incumbent Kai Buchmann in a run-off vote that put the spotlight on the city of Nordhausen in the former East German state of Thuringia.

The prospect of a win for the far-right party was described as a “catastrophe” by the keepers of a nearby concentration camp memorial ahead of the ballot.

Around 60,000 prisoners were held in the Mittelbau-Dora slave labour camp — a sub-camp of the notorious Buchenwald — only 6 km (four miles) from central Nordhausen.

They were forced to make V-2 rockets in brutal underground conditions, with around one in three worked to death.

An AfD mayor would not have been welcome at commemorative events at the site’s memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, told AFP.

‘Weight lifted’

“The AfD is an extreme right-wing party whose ideology is congruent or at least very similar in many areas to the ideology of the National Socialists,” he said.

Prophet looked confident ahead of the vote, flashing a brilliant white grin to passers-by at his campaign stand in the small but prosperous city.

The 61-year-old argued he represented a fresh start for Nordhausen after six-year incumbent Buchmann had fallen out of favour with many residents after repeatedly clashing with the city council.

Like many members of the far-right party, Prophet has been accused of extremism and historical revisionism.

In a blog post in 2020, he claimed the Allied forces that liberated the Mittelbau-Dora camp were only interested in snooping on the site’s rocket and missile technology.

He also called for an end to Germany’s Schuldkult, or “guilt cult”, a reference to the country’s efforts to remember and learn from the Holocaust.

But in the end, Prophet failed to gather the support needed to become city mayor, collecting 45.1 percent of the vote. 

The result guaranteed a “normal life for Nordhausen”, Buchmann said after the outcome became clear.

With the result “a huge weight has been lifted”, Wagner told news channel NTV.

It made clear that “you cannot win elections with historical revisionism, with an attitude that downplays the suffering of concentration camp prisoners”, he said.

Regional tests

Nonetheless, right-wing extremist attitudes are becoming increasingly widespread in Germany, according to a survey published this week by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Eight percent of Germans can now be classified as having clear right-wing extremist views, compared with two to three percent in previous years, the foundation said.

The AfD, created in 2013 as an anti-euro outfit before seizing on anger over mass migration to Germany, has had a string of successes of late.

The party secured its first district administrator position in June, also in Thuringia, and its first town mayor in July in neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt.

At the national level, recent opinion polls have put the party on 22 percent, above Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left SPD and only a few points behind the main opposition conservative party.

The AfD’s support is especially strong in Thuringia, where it is polling  around 34 percent, according to a recent survey by regional broadcaster MDR.

Thuringia will hold a vote for its regional parliament in September 2024, along with two other former East German states, Brandenburg and Saxony.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)