German leader urges parties to boycott far right after its election wins

BERLIN — Victories for Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany in two eastern states prompted Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday to urge mainstream parties to forge coalitions without the anti-migrant party.

“All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists,” Scholz told Reuters, describing the outcome as “bitter.”

Preliminary results the morning after Sunday’s election saw the AfD with a clear win in Thuringia with 32.8 percent of votes - marking the first time that the far right has won a state election in Germany since World War II. In neighboring Saxony, the AfD is on track to finish a strong second with 30.6 percent - just 1.3 points behind the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU). Results will be confirmed by state election commissioners in the coming days.

“Our country cannot and must not get used to that. The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation,” Scholz said.

All other parties in Germany have ruled out forming alliances with the AfD, but the far-right’s strength in numbers in both state parliaments will make coalition building particularly tricky - a potential sign of the problems to come in next year’s federal elections.

AfD co-leader Alice Weidel, said on Monday, however, that without her party “a stable majority is not possible” in Saxony and Thuringia, where the AfD is categorized as “extremist” by regional domestic intelligence.

“The voters have made a clear decision. They want the AfD to participate in the government,” Weidel told German broadcaster ZDF, adding that she doesn’t believe the “undemocratic firewall” established by the other parties against the AfD can be maintained.

Following Sunday’s elections, hundreds of people took to the streets in Saxony and Thuringia to protest the shift to the right. Around 500 demonstrators gathered at the state parliament in Erfurt, the state capital of Thuringia, police said. Small demonstrations were also held in Berlin and Hamburg. In the capital, around 350 people assembled in front of a district AfD office carrying placards with slogans such as “Ban the AfD now. Ban Nazi parties now.”

While the AfD’s chances of governing a state are slim, in Thuringia the party will be granted special rights of a “blocking minority” after winning more than a third of seats in the regional parliament. The rule enables the party to veto certain decisions such as amendments to the regional state constitution and the appointment of judges. In Saxony, the AfD fell one seat short.

Founded in 2013 as a Euroskeptic party, the party’s anti-migrant rhetoric became a party policy mainstay following the 2015 migration crisis. In the years since, the AfD radicalized to such an extent that the party is under surveillance at federal level after being categorized as “suspected extremist.”

A poll conducted Sunday by Infratest Dimap suggested that the AfD is no longer the “protest party” that many voters and observers once described. According to surveys, around half of AfD voters in Saxony and Thuringia voted for the far right “out of conviction for my party.” Around 40 percent voted “out of disappointment with other parties.”

“‘Protest’ is if you vote for them once, but, there are a lot of people who have voted for them the second or even the third time,” said Andrea Römmele, dean of executive education at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.

“Some of the reasons why people vote for the AfD is, indeed, because they are dissatisfied with the national coalition. But what the numbers also show is that for people in these states migration and security are the most important issues, and they see the AfD as the most competent party to solve these issues,” she said.

The center-right CDU, which has steadily shifted to the right since the departure of former party leader and former chancellor Angela Merkel, is most likely to lead coalition building in both states, where cooperation with the Left Party could be one way to form a three-party majority.

But such a coalition would require a discussion at the CDU’s federal level regarding the party’s strict no cooperation line with the Left - a direct descendant of former East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED).

Senior CDU politician Mario Czaja argued following Sunday’s election that the same stance cannot apply to the AfD and the Left. Anyone who equates the Left with the AfD is trivializing the “inhumane thinking and ideology” of the AfD, Czaja said.

The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), founded in January this year as a breakaway from the Left, could also play a key role in coalition building. After months of pushing a pro-Russia campaign and hard-line approach to migration, the populist left wing but socially conservative party racked up double digits in Sunday’s election.

“The big challenge with the BSW will be in coalition negotiations because they want foreign policy issues, which are not normally part of state-level coalition debate, to be part of that,” said Römmele, pointing to issues such as military aid for Ukraine and defense.

Parties in Scholz’s governing federal coalition - the center-left Social Democrats, the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats - are less likely to be part of future coalitions in Saxony and Thuringia. None of these parties traditionally poll well in the two states, but the single-digit results were nonetheless a miserable showing for the chancellor’s beleaguered government just a year before federal elections.

While Scholz’s Social Democrats avoided the “gloomy forecast” that the party could fail to cross the 5 percent threshold required to sit in state parliament, the same couldn’t be said for his coalition partners. In Saxony, the Greens will remain in parliament by a whisker after winning 5.1 percent of votes there.

As the dust settles in Saxony and Thuringia, observers are already looking to Sept. 22, when Brandenburg - another AfD stronghold - votes. Losing power there, where Scholz’s Social Democrats have held the state premiership since reunification, could spark serious discussions about the chancellor’s ability to run for a second term, Römmele said.