Here’s What Happened At The Polls In 2 German States Yesterday

The Nazis Did Extremely Well But Won't Control Any Government

There were high turnout elections yesterday in two states that were part of East Germany, Thuringia and Saxony. Thuringia is relatively small with just over 2 million people and no big cities— Erfurt, Jena, Gera and Weimar being the biggest. You can’t completely dismiss is as some backwater because Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther, Johann von Goethe, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Max Weber, Richard Strauss, Otto Dix, and Friedrich von Schiller are all from there. It was the first place that backed the Nazis before they gained national power in the 1930s— and was the home of the Buchenwald concentration camp. History is repeating itself and the new Nazi Party (the AfD) is the top party in the state. Yesterday, as expected, the Nazis took the biggest share of the vote of any party 32.9%, with the Christian Democrats— Germany’s mainstream conservatives— coming in second with 23.7%. The Nazis won 32 of 88 seats in the legislature, not enough to form a government but more than any other party.

Saxony, in the extreme east of the country, bordering on the Czech Republic and Poland has about twice as many people and three real cities: Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz. In 2019’s federal election’s the Nazis got a higher share of the vote in Saxony than in any other state and in this year’s EU parliamentary elections, the Nazis won a majority in Saxony. Like Thuringia, there are a lot of refugees from Ukraine and Syria there.

And yesterday, the AfD was basically tied with the Christian Democrats and will probably get 40 seats to the CDU’s 41 (out of 120). So now they we’ve covered the geography, let’s see what we can make out of the parties. Like we saw, the AfD are the Nazis, sort of like the MAGA Party, but even a bit worse since they know exactly where this is going and most of the MAGAs are too dumb to grasp anything beyond a few hours into the future. The CDU (Christian Democrats) is the mainstream conservative party, analogous to the GOP minus the MAGAts. The SPD (Social Democrats), which got eviscerated, is something like the American Democratic Party, ever so slightly to the left of dead-center, not really meaning much. The party that came in third was a brand new spin-off of The Left— Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. When it comes to economics, it’s the furthest left of all the parties. But before you get too excited, it’s a socially-conservative party, pro-Putin, Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant. Basically a bunch of assholes who happen to be anti-corporate and demand higher taxes of the rich. A freak show, that doesn’t know it’s a freak show, it’s kind of like the least right-wing part of the MAGA movement.

The Left (Die Linke) is the democratic socialist party, kind like our DSA. In January. Half its members left with Sahra Wagenknecht to join her new party. And then there ar the Greens, who basically got wiped out in Thuringia (3.2% of the vote, no seats) and did alright in Saxony (5.2% of the vote and 7 seats, one more than Die Linke).

Presumably, there will be anti-Nazi coalitions running the legislatures in both states, although the headlines all over Europe are basically “A far-right party became the biggest force in a German state parliament for the first time since the second world war.” There’s another state election in two weeks, this time in Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin and is also very Nazi-friendly, although historically it’s been a stronghold for the SPD. Most polls— virtually all polls— show the Nazis on the verge of winning the biggest share of the votes.

This morning, the Wall Street Journal’s Bertrand Benoit reported that Thuringia’s Nazis “obtained almost half the votes cast while 40% of the voters in Saxony decided Hitler was right all along. He also noted that far right extremists have done exceptionally well in recent elections in France— where a post-election government still hasn’t come together— Holland, Sweden, Italy and Finland (leaving out Slovakia, where the neo-Nazis just won again). In Germany, a poll last week showed that “54% of respondents said they didn’t trust any party to solve the country’s problems. Only 16% said they trusted the government.” Numbers have been even worse in other countries where a majority of voters said “democracy wasn’t working.”

Herfried Münkler, one of Germany’s leading political scientists, thinks the lack of trust in government is partly the product of strident populist rhetoric, whose alarmism creates a sense of urgency that no government can ever get ahead of.

At the same time, “crises are stacking up like layers in a cake faster than they can be solved,” he said, drawing an analogy with the 1920s in Europe. “Governments are overwhelmed…They are struggling to persuade people that while the problems are real, they are solvable.”

There are concrete reasons why governments may feel less effective today. In France, Italy and the U.K., high public debt is restricting governments’ policy choices. When newly appointed British Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled plans for large unfunded tax cuts in 2022, worried investors caused a run on British government bonds, the pound fell to a record low against the dollar, and she resigned after six weeks in office.

Across Europe, a rapidly aging population has increased demand for medical treatment. Combined with a growing skills shortage in the health sector, this has led to longer waiting times for treatment, leading the World Health Organization to warn of an impending health crisis in the region. 

Democratic states, ponderous by design with their thickets of laws and checks and balances, can be slow to react to crises. When the 2008 financial crisis broke out, threatening the banking system, the German government had to overrule decades-old parliamentary procedures to pass emergency legislation in days instead of months.

This built-in weakness has been a focus of populist attacks. In the early 2000s, the Polish populists and twin brothers Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczyński, then president and prime minister of Poland, denounced the strictures imposed by the rule of law as “legal impossibilism,” justifying their attempt to increase their executive powers.

In some cases, analysts say, the problems facing governments are so costly and complex to resolve that politicians end up pretending they don’t exist. An oft-quoted example is the absence of efforts by Berlin to reduce the share of natural gas that Germany imported from Russia after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. 

This left Berlin vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin, which began throttling gas deliveries to Germany after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Left without a choice, Germany did react in the end, turning to more expensive liquefied natural gas from the U.S. and elsewhere.

…[P]olitical fragmentation is gumming up the work of governments, further undermining voter confidence. In Germany, Scholz’s three-way-government of Social Democrats, pro-market liberals and environmentalists— the first such coalition in postwar Germany— barely managed to agree on a budget this year amid constant internecine bickering.

“It could be that we are reaching the limits of political compromise,” said Münkler. “That’s not a good sign because this could push a majority of voters to call for a strong man or a strong woman. One who wouldn’t compromise but just decide.”