How the parties went in the regional elections in Germany
At the regional in Germany, Merz's CDU achieved its first post-Merkel victory. Pierluigi Mennitti's article from Berlin
The foregone wins are less news, but they are no less important for that. Friedrich Merz achieves the first post-Merkel victory with his CDU. He does so through an intermediary, breaking the regional vote in Schleswig-Holstein thanks to the popularity of the outgoing president, Daniel Günter, reconfirmed – it can be said – by popular acclaim. The polls quoted it at 38%, it surpassed 43, almost 11 and a half points more than five years ago.
It is a regional vote and its value must be taken with a grain of salt because, as almost always in this type of elections, local factors prevail over national ones. Suffice it to recall that, just a month ago, the SPD triumphed in the Saarland.
Undoubtedly, the caliber of the Christian-Democratic candidate is valid, who in five years has been able to govern a Land that is certainly not difficult, but at the center of great economic interests, especially energy, as a protagonist in wind production so important for the success of the German energy transition and, at this stage, resilience to the tensions caused by war. On the contrary, the weakness of the Social Democratic candidate is valid, never able to intercept the needs and passions of the citizens of this strip of the extreme north of Germany.
However, elections always represent a symbolic moment, fix definite perceptions in the electorate and offer political actors positive or negative impetus for future action. And in just six days the vote will be back in another German Land, North Rhine-Westphalia, and the caliber will be different: because it is the most populous Land in Germany (it is the one that led Armin Laschet, before venturing into the unfortunate race to the chancellery), often a forerunner of political trends, and because the outcome is uncertain. The polls predict a head to head between the two main contenders.
It will therefore be a week in which the political debate will find internal hints and will not be dominated exclusively by the war in Ukraine, as has happened in the last two months. And the reverberations of the results in the north will be inevitable.
In fact, the Social Democrats should be concerned about its size rather than the data of the defeat (-11.3 compared to the previous vote). The SPD finished in third place, surpassed by the Greens who were also evidently rewarded by their participation in the local government of Günter (a Jamaican coalition between CDU, Greens and liberals). The proposed candidate did not "pull", on the contrary he even struggled to make his name known to the voters, a suicidal choice. However, it costs the party the interruption of a winning trend that had lasted since the federal elections last September, confirmed by other regional elections, and which had made the spin doctors of the party coin the slogan of the Social Democratic decade. What was opening up for post-Merkel Germany. At least in Kiel (the capital of Schleswig-Holstein) it was a "short decade". If it were to be lost in North Rhine-Westphalia, for the SPD it will already be time for internal processes, because it would mean that, in a head-to-head race, no added value will come from Berlin (i.e. from Olaf Scholz), no tailwind.
Clear winners are also the Greens, which with more than 5 percentage points of growth, are now the second largest party in the region (18.3%). Schleswig-Holstein is the electoral home of Robert Habeck, the Minister of Economy and Climate at the top of all the new government's approval polls in Berlin. He had been Günter's minister before emigrating to the capital: the success of the ecologists is also a sign of approval for his national policy. The Greens are playing the government card more and more, both at the federal and local levels, and the voters follow: the traditional ones but above all the new ones, who like the pragmatic course of the current leadership.
Another piece of news concerns the far-right wing of the German political arena. The nationalists of Allianz für Deutschland miss the 5% threshold and leave the regional parliament. Only the elections of the next few years will tell us whether in Schleswig-Holstein it was an accident or the beginning of the end of the largest far-right party that has ever appeared in the history of the Bundesrepublik. The figure on Sunday, however, is symbolic: after years of successes that have brought nationalist representatives in all regional parliaments and in the Bundestag, for the first time there is an exit: the Landtag of Kiel will be the first not to include Afd deputies.
Has the era of ebbing begun? Afd's political difficulty is quite evident. The traditional workhorse of immigration is no longer relevant and pro-Russian positions in foreign policy certainly do not help at this stage. The party has no issues that involve voters, has a modest political staff further impoverished by internal quarrels, is unable to affect government policies in any way, neither nationally nor locally: in the long run a party of pure opposition is doomed to fail in German politics.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/germania-elezioni-regonali/ on Mon, 09 May 2022 12:37:26 +0000.