5 takeaways from Germany’s eastern elections

BERLIN — Germany’s far right is here — and it’s here to stay.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) on Sunday scored a stunning win in an eastern German state election, amid rising voter discontent at Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left national government.
The AfD’s victory in Thuringia and strong second place in Saxony has prompted a new round of soul searching in Berlin, a year out from national elections which could see EU powerhouse Germany tilt to the right.
“Our country cannot and must not get used to this,” Scholz told Reuters after the results came in. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining our country’s reputation.”
In Thuringia, the AfD — which has been classified as extremist in some German states — gained a clear victory with nearly 33 percent of the vote. In the more populous state of Saxony, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) eked out a victory with around 32 percent of the vote, with the AfD trailing close behind.
Here are the five things you need to know about the election outcome, as Germany’s far right claimed its biggest electoral success since World War II.
Germany’s mainstream leaders have made a concerted effort to stop the rise of the AfD by warning voters of the party’s growing extremism, with some leaders even calling it a Nazi party. 
State-level domestic intelligence authorities have classified the local branches of the party in both Saxony and Thuringia as extremist organizations aiming to undermine German democracy. Earlier this year, Saskia Esken, the co-chief of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), came out in favor of discussing a ban of the AfD — if only, as she put it, to “shake voters” out of their complacency.
The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, one of the party’s most extreme figures, was twice found guilty by a German court of purposely employing Nazi rhetoric.
But despite the persistent warnings from centrist leaders, institutions and courts, the AfD has continued its ascent, particularly in Germany’s East.
That points to a core problem that won’t be easy for centrist parties to grapple with — a growing mistrust of the centrists and the country’s institutions that has fomented anti-establishment fervor across a large swath of the country.
In other words, even as many centrist leaders and institutions in Germany warn of the AfD’s extremism, many voters have simply stopped listening. In fact, the approach may be backfiring by alienating AfD voters.
Mainstream media outlets too continue to struggle with how to handle the AfD’s rising popularity. On election night, one public television journalist, during an interview with Höcke, referred to the AfD in Thuringia as extremist.
“Please stop stigmatizing me,” Höcke replied. “We are the number one people’s party in Thuringia. You don’t want to classify one-third of Thuringian voters as right-wing extremists, do you?”
In some ways, the biggest winner of the night was the populist-left Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which is led by a former member of East Germany’s communist party. The BSW finished third in both states, a notable result for a party that only formed several months ago.
The party, which merges traditional right-wing stances on immigration and other social issues, has repeatedly called for an end to German military aid for Ukraine and negotiations with Putin — a view for which there is much sympathy in Germany’s formerly communist East.
“We want the war in Ukraine to end and we don’t see that happening with more and more arms deliveries,” the party’s founder, Sahra Wagenknecht, told public broadcaster ARD.
Due to the increasingly fragmented political landscape across the East, the BSW has become kingmaker when it comes to the formation of state-level coalition governments, particularly since all parties have vowed not to form coalitions with the AfD.
In both Saxony and Thuringia, the BSW is certain to play a major role in the next governments.
The three parties in Germany’s ruling coalition — Scholz’s SPD, the Greens and the fiscally conservative Free Democratic Party (FDP) — suffered significant losses in the Sunday ballots. In Thuringia, the Greens and the FDP both crashed out of the state parliament after failing to meet the five-percent threshold necessary to gain seats. Moreover, all three coalition parties in Thuringia together barely gained more than a combined 10 percent of the vote.
While the SPD lost less ground in the elections, it was still an awful result for a party coming off its worst performance in a nationwide election in more than a century in June’s European election. 
In a bid to reverse its political fortunes just ahead of the election, Scholz’s government announced a raft of tougher migration measures — showing how the AfD’s rise on an anti-immigration message has shaken the country’s political establishment. But that didn’t seem to help the party’s fortunes.
“There is a large proportion of people who have no confidence in the ability of established politics to find solutions and have therefore deliberately opted for a negative model,” the SPD’s secretary-general, Kevin Kühnert, said in a reaction on Monday.
The SPD has a chance to redeem itself on Sept. 22, when voters in the eastern state of Brandenburg head to polls. In that state, the SPD is currently polling at around 20 percent based on the popularity of the state premier, SPD politician Dietmar Woidke. Still, the AfD is polling first in Brandenburg at 24 percent.
It’s also telling that Woidke has refused to campaign with Scholz, telling Handelsblatt earlier this month he was not planning to hold joint election campaign events with the chancellor (even though Scholz’s constituency is in Brandenburg). That’s probably a politically wise move, given Scholz’s dismal approval ratings in the East and beyond.
Far-right parties across Europe often benefit from protest voters who simply want to broadcast their dissatisfaction with mainstream parties. But in Germany’s East, it seems, voters are increasingly embracing the AfD not out of protest, but out of earnest political conviction.
Every second AfD voter in Thuringia and Saxony voted for the party because they believe in its message, according to data from infratest dimap for ARD. This is a shift compared to previous elections.
What’s more, voters in both states, according to surveys, said the AfD would be best placed to represent the interests of people in eastern Germany and to pursue better asylum and refugee policies. On other issues too, including on social protection and fighting crime, the party ranked among the top two parties in terms of voters’ trust.
In sum, it looks increasingly like the AfD has entrenched itself in the East and has become what Germans call a Volkspartei , or “people’s party,” a title that was, until recently, reserved for mainstream parties like the SPD and CDU.
It’s not the first time that politicians are expected to be put to the test during coalition formations in the East. After the previous state election in Thuringia in 2019, a major political crisis erupted when Thomas Kemmerich, an FDP politician, was elected premier with the support of the AfD.
The cooperation with the AfD led to a massive nationwide outcry, forcing Kemmerich to step back. He was replaced by the Left party’s Bodo Ramelow, who presided over a minority government in the state.
That episode underscored the difficulty forming coalition governments without the AfD in an increasingly fractured political landscape across the East.
Despite the AfD’s strong performance in both Saxony and Thuringia on Sunday, the party is unlikely to take power because all other parties say they won’t form coalitions with it. In Thuringia, therefore, the only realistic majority government to be formed is an alliance between the CDU, BSW and the Left party. The CDU has, however, in a party resolution officially ruled out any cooperation with the Left party.
Given the complicated dynamics, it could take months for new coalitions to form. The AfD, meanwhile, is bound to make things as difficult as possible — depicting its exclusion from the coalitions as the disenfranchisement of its voters.