The right-wing Alternative for Germany party won a record number of votes in Sunday’s European Parliament elections in a sharp rebuke of Olaf Scholz’s three-party ruling German coalition and a sign of a rightward political shift across the continent.
The party, known as AfD, came in second with 16% of the vote, behind Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats, which won 30%. The AfD performed almost 5 percentage points better than in 2019. It won more voters than each of Germany’s three coalition parties in the election. It comes as the AfD has posted its strongest showing in national elections and Scholz’s coalition has reached a record low in popularity in the country, according to opinion polls.
On Monday, Alice Weidel, one of the two leaders of the AfD, called on Chancellor Scholz to call new parliamentary elections. Just like French President Emmanuel Macron did after his party’s disastrous results. A spokesman for Mr Scholz ruled out an early election.
Describing her party as seeing “great success”, Ms Weidel told a news conference in Berlin that the government was working against Germany, not for it. “People are tired of it,” she said.
The election results could have far-reaching consequences. Europe’s sweeping plan for a series of environmental plans called the Green Deal may be losing traction, and Mr Scholz’s opponents have already begun to question the legitimacy of his government. They argue that if the EU election results are borne out, it could mean only a third of Germans support his tripartite governing partnership.
The AfD, once a fringe group, is under surveillance by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency on suspicion of being ‘extremist’. Three-quarters of Germans said they believed the party was a threat to democracy. But anger over the recent killing of a police officer in Mannheim, Germany, just days before the EU election, and the arrest of an Afghan migrant on suspicion of stabbing, may have reignited fears that the AfD routinely exploits.
The AfD also achieved stronger results than in the past despite a series of public scandals that led to two of its top candidates for EU positions being banned from campaigning. Moreover, millions of people have taken to the streets this year to protest the party’s anti-immigration stance. This includes a meeting attended by AfD members to discuss mass deportations of immigrants.
“It’s amazing that the party has risen from the ashes,” said Sudha David-Wilp, regional director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office. But dissatisfaction with the government, a strong base in eastern Germany (the AfD leads in all five states in the EU vote) and recent attacks on officers have most likely spurred the AfD’s advance, Mr. David-Wilp said. .
“They are not going to disappear from the German political landscape anytime soon,” she added.
The figures fell short of the highest turnout expected a few months ago, but AfD members celebrated the result on Sunday night when the party looked likely to win close to 25% of the vote.
Mr. Weidel said the results were driven by an aversion to the status quo. “People are sick of the level of bureaucracy we get in Brussels,” she told German public broadcaster after the first expected results were announced on Sunday night.
As the results came in on Sunday evening, Mr. Scholz appeared at the Social Democratic Party headquarters in Berlin. But he responded “no” when reporters asked him if he wanted to comment, according to German magazine Der Spiegel.
The AfD’s fortunes appeared to rise with the fall of the Greens, an environmentally focused party that had once been a stronghold in Germany. Preliminary results show the Green Party’s vote share has fallen by nearly half, to 12% from a high of 20% in the 2019 election.
Emilia Fester, a Green Party lawmaker and one of the youngest elected officials, said in an email: “It is also clear that, despite the AfD’s gains, few young people have switched from our Greens to the AfD. Instead, many people voted for smaller parties that had programs closer to the Greens and were more focused on individual issues,” she said. “This gives me hope.”
This was the first election in which 16- and 17-year-olds were allowed to vote, and the AfD achieved a big win among those under 30, increasing its share of that electorate by 10%. The Green Party, once led by activist Greta Thunberg and student protesters opposing climate change, saw an 18% drop in voters.
“In the past, young voters tended to be more left-leaning and progressive,” Florian Stockell, a political science professor at the University of Exeter in England, said in an email. “But this time I went to the right.”
He added that the AfD’s recent push to market itself on TikTok may have played a role.
“This is consistent with recent research showing that young people across Europe, especially young men, tend to take more right-leaning positions,” Mr Stoeckel said.
Ultimately, the result is more of a symbolic victory for the AfD than a change to the dynamics of the European Parliament. Last month, the AfD’s top EU candidate, Maximilian Kra, was expelled from the European Parliament by the far-right Identity Democrats party after he vaguely expressed in May how evil the Nazi SS was.
On Monday, AfD members voted to oust Mr Krar from the EU delegation. Ultimately, the party plans to send between 9 and 14 people to Brussels. Their powers will be limited and eliminated like other far-right blocs in parliament.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting.
