Far right party posts gains but loses 2 state elections
BERLIN — A farright party made strong gains in a pair of state elections in eastern Germany on Sunday, but opponents from the political mainstream won both votes — salvaging their position as the top votegetters and providing some relief for the national government.
Voters in Saxony, a region of around 4.1 million people bordering Poland and the Czech Republic, and neighboring Brandenburg, which has 2.5 million inhabitants and surrounds Berlin, elected new state legislatures.
All eyes were on the performance of the farright Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which is strongest in the excommunist east, and on how badly Germany’s governing parties would do after a rough 18 months for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition in Berlin. A symbolically important AfD win in either state could have further destabilized the national government.
“The good signal in both states is that a few weeks ago the farright was ahead, and today there was a clear signal against AfD,” said Lars Klingbeil, the general secretary of the centerleft Social Democrats, Merkel’s junior partners in Berlin.
The governing parties performed better than preelection polling predicted. However, both lost ground compared with the last state elections in 2014 — before the migrant influx that boosted AfD’s support and helped it into Germany’s national parliament in 2017.
Merkel’s centerright Christian Democratic Union won 32.1% of the vote in Saxony, which it has governed since German reunification in 1990, down from 39% five years ago. AfD took 27.5%, which was its best performance yet in any state election and compares with 9.7% five years ago.
In Brandenburg, the Social Democrats won 26.2% of the vote, down from 31.9% five years ago. Like the CDU’s showing in Saxony, it was their worst performance there in 29 years of democracy. The Social Democrats have led Brandenburg since reunification.
AfD won 23.5%, up from 12.2% in the 2014 state election.
The Greens, who have traditionally struggled in the east but surged in national polls over recent months, made only fairly modest gains Sunday, taking 8.6% in Saxony and 10.8% in Brandenburg. The environmentalist party may, however, be needed to govern both regions.
Saxony has long been a hotbed of farright groups. It is not only an AfD stronghold, but also the state where the antiimmigration group PEGIDA —Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West — rose to prominence with weekly protests in Dresden at the height of the 2015 migration crisis.