The right-wing Alternative for Germany party won a record number of votes in European Parliament elections on Sunday, in a sharp rebuke to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling three-party coalition in Germany and a sign of the political shift to the right across the continent. .
The party, known as the AfD, won 16 percent of the vote, placing second behind Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats, who won 30 percent. AfD scored almost five percentage points better than in 2019 elections and attracted more voters than each of Germany’s three coalition parties. It was the AfD’s strongest showing in a nationwide election, and came as Scholz’s coalition has reached record levels of popularity in the country, according to polls.
On Monday, Alice Weidel, one of the AfD’s two leaders, demanded that Scholz call new parliamentary elections, just as President Emmanuel Macron of France did after his party’s dismal results. A spokesman for Scholz ruled out early elections.
Describing his party’s “great success,” Weidel told a news conference in Berlin that the government was working against Germany, not for it. “People are tired of this,” she said.
The election results could have far-reaching consequences. Europe’s sweeping plans for a series of environmental initiatives called the Green Deal may lose steam, and Scholz’s adversaries have already begun to question the legitimacy of his government. If the EU election results are confirmed, they argue, it could indicate that only a third of Germans support their tripartite governing partnership.
AfD, once a fringe group, is being monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency on suspicion of being “extremist.” Three-quarters of Germans say they believe the party represents a threat to democracy. But outrage over the recent murder of a police officer in Mannheim, Germany, just days before the EU elections, and the arrest of an Afghan immigrant suspected of the stabbing may have reignited fears that the AfD routinely capitalizes on.
The AfD also had stronger results than in the past despite its two main candidates for EU posts being banned from campaigning after a series of public scandals. On top of that, millions of people took to the streets this year to protest the party’s anti-immigration stance, including a meeting attended by AfD members where the mass deportation of immigrants was discussed.
“It is remarkable that the party has risen from the ashes,” said Sudha David-Wilp, regional director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund. But discontent with the government, a strong base in eastern Germany (the AfD took the lead in all five states there in the EU vote) and the recent attack on the official likely propelled the AfD forward, David said. -Wilp.
“They are not going to disappear from the German political landscape anytime soon,” he added.
Although the numbers fell short of the electoral highs predicted months ago, when it looked like the party could capture around 25 percent, AfD members celebrated the results on Sunday night.
Weidel attributed the result to distaste for the status quo. “People are fed up with the amount of bureaucracy they get from Brussels,” she told a German public broadcaster after the first projected results were announced Sunday night.
When the results came in on Sunday afternoon, Scholz made an appearance at the headquarters of his Social Democratic Party in Berlin. But when journalists asked him if he wanted to comment, he replied: “No,” according to German magazine Der Spiegel.
The AfD’s fortunes seemed to have improved in tandem with the fall of the Greens, an environmentally focused party for which Germany was once a stronghold. The Greens saw their vote share fall by almost half, to around 12 percent, according to preliminary results, from a high of more than 20 percent in the 2019 election.
Emilia Fester, a member of the Green Party in Parliament and one of its youngest elected officials, said in an email: “Although the AfD has made progress, it is also clear that few young people have switched from us Greens to the AfD. Instead, many have voted for smaller parties that often have programs close to the Greens and are more focused on individual issues,” she said. “This gives me hope.”
This election was also the first time that 16- and 17-year-old Germans were allowed to vote, and the AfD scored major victories in the under-30 demographic, increasing its share of that electorate by 10 percent, results showed. The Greens, once powered by activist Greta Thunberg and students protesting against climate change, saw an 18 percent drop in those voters.
“In the past, younger voters have tended to be more left-wing and progressive,” Florian Stoeckel, a political science professor at the University of Exeter in England, said in an email. “However, this time they turned right.”
He added that the AfD’s recent push to promote itself on TikTok could have played a role.
“This is in line with recent findings that young people, and especially younger men, across Europe tend to adopt more right-wing positions,” Stoeckel said.
Ultimately, the results could be more of a symbolic victory for the AfD than one that changes the dynamics of the European Parliament. Last month, the party was expelled by the Identity and Democracy Party, a far-right group in the European Parliament, after Maximilian Krah, the AfD’s leading EU candidate, made ambiguous comments in May about how evil the party was. Nazi SS.
On Monday, AfD members voted to expel Krah from their EU delegation. In the end, the party will send to Brussels 14 people (up from nine) whose power will be limited, removed as they are from any other far-right bloc in Parliament.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting.