Photo: Steffen Prößdorf, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Left-wing parties took a heavy beating in local and mayoral elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia on Sunday, May 26th. The parties of the minority government of Thuringia—the Social Democrats (SPD), the hard-left Die Linke, and the Greens—could only garner an insubstantial 23% of the votes, a sign that Germans have had enough of the energy, green and migration policies that have left the country in an economically and socially dire state.
The clear winner of the elections was the centre-right CDU and the right-wing, anti-globalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), two parties which are in opposition both in the Thuringian parliament and in the Berlin Bundestag. The CDU garnered 27.6% of the votes, modestly improving on its 27.3% result from the elections five years ago. The biggest gains were made by AfD, which went from 17.7% to 26.4%.
The Social Democrats, who are the largest governing party in Berlin, managed to get only 11.1% (down from 13.4%), and their Berlin coalition partners, the Greens and the liberal FDP finished on 3.8% and 2.7% respectively (down from 7.5% and 4.8%). The leftist Die Linke, which has led the Thuringian government for the past ten years, suffered the biggest losses, dropping from its previous 14% to just 8.4%. The rest of the votes went to independents and other, smaller parties.
Mario Voigt—Thuringia CDU leader—said the parties of the government had lost the people’s trust because of their policies in recent years. As the politician told The European Conservative in an interview in January,
The hard-working people of this country feel that the traffic light coalition is constantly reaching into their pockets through higher burdens, raising the cost of living, more bureaucracy, high numbers of illegal migrants.
Since coming to power in 2021, left-wing parties have been losing support throughout Germany and are set to lose next year’s federal elections. Meanwhile, the CDU and AfD have become the two strongest parties, profiting from a series of harmful decisions and political infighting within the Berlin coalition that have made the German energy, cost of living, and migration crises more severe.
The local elections on Sunday will be followed by state elections later this year in Thuringia, as well as in Brandenburg and Saxony, which will determine who gets to govern these eastern German states.
Disillusionment with the government and mainstream parties is even more visible in this part of Germany: according to opinion polls, AfD is projected to win all three elections with around 25-35% of the votes. A similarly anti-globalist and anti-immigration—but leftist—party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which split from Die Linke last year, could finish third or fourth with 10-15%.
“It must be taken into account that the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht only ran sporadically in these local elections. In the European elections on June 9th and the state elections on September 1st, it will be in serious competition with Die Linke,” Hermann Binkert, head of the INSA polling institute told Der Tagesspiegel. Of the AfD he said that, despite recent scandals surrounding the party, it has significantly improved its result in Thuringia by almost ten percentage points. The AfD was kicked out of the right-wing Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament last week after the party’s lead candidate in the EP elections, Maximilian Krah, made comments deemed to relativise the SS. This may have put a dent in the AfD’s until recently soaring popularity.
Conservative publication Tichys Einblick writes that if the AfD was expected to have a better showing at the local elections, it would only have itself to blame, but also the concerted efforts of the mainstream parties, the media, and the domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, to undermine the credibility of the party. Another conservative outlet, Apollo News, criticised the mainstream media for reporting on the local elections as if the AfD was the party that had suffered losses, and not its left-wing rivals. According to the publication, the results mean it will become virtually impossible to maintain the cordon sanitaire or Brandmauer (firewall) around the party on a local level, because the mainstream parties do not have enough votes combined to form a majority.