Elections 2023: Bavaria/Hesse & Poland’s campaign
In Germany’s Bavaria (Munich) & Hesse (Frankfurt) voters swing determinately to the right. In Poland, into the final week of a brutal campaign.
Continuing our pledge at Andelman Unleashed to report and comment on every national election everywhere in the world, we depart from our mode, with elections in Germany’s two dominant states, while in Poland voters head into the final week of a bitter campaign. All will shape the future of Europe.
Germany’s right turn
Germany’s two dominant states appear to have rejoined the ranks of a host of floundering European nations struggling to find a new direction, let alone a highly functioning government. That direction is marked by a sudden and quite dramatic swing to the right. Voters in Bavaria (its capital is Munich and a birthplace of the Nazi movement and the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923) and Hesse (home of Germany’s financial capital, Frankfurt) turned toward the center-right Christian Democrats but especially toward the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party that is really the spiritual heir of the Nazis.
But far more dramatically, all this is existentially important for the future of Europe where voters will elect the continent’s next parliament next June. The great Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung summarized most succinctly the results in Germany’s two largest and wealthiest states:
“The results are a blow for all three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's left-wing-led national coalition,” the BBC observed. “The ramifications will be felt across Germany. In both regions, conservative and right-wing populist parties used the election campaign to bash Olaf Scholz's national government over migration and energy policy.” It paid off.
What is particularly instructive, however, is less the absolute vote tallies of the far right, but how dramatically their numbers have increased since the last state elections five years ago. In both states, AfD registered enormous vote surges—up 4.4% in Bavaria and 5.3% in Hesse. Their gain was outdone only by the 7.6% surge of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Hesse, its 34.6% of the vote catapulting this party into a first-place finish with more than twice the votes accumulated by Chancellor Scholz’s SPD.
Two other members of Scholz’s ruling national coalition suffered in the balloting, with his own SPD plunging to just 8.4% of the vote.
But he still couldn’t break above 40%...look to your right, Markus
As Germany’s Deutsche Welle put it, “The elections in the two wealthy states were seen as a barometer for the entire country's mood. A projection shows the far-right AfD party has made impressive gains… All three parties in the federal coalition government are on track to lose support in both states.” Needless to say, the AfD was ecstatic about the results.
AfD’s Alice Weidel leaves no doubt about her reaction
Notwithstanding its clear appeal to voters, however, and while the AfD will field a substantial block of votes in the two states’ parliaments, it will not become a member of the new government in either state. No other party will agree to work with them in any coalition. But the consequences are far broader.
Over the next two years, it is entirely foreseeable that AfD could emerge as the dominant party in Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony, the three states that once comprised East Germany—quite a stunning outcome since the AfD is so closely aligned with the Kremlin, which once catastrophically dominated the Soviet ally, East Germany. Clearly more contemporary fears, especially over the surge of immigrants, have come to trump ancestral antipathy to either Naziism or Soviet communism.
As the great Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung [SDZ] concluded, a “trend has been evident for some time in the federal government and especially in eastern German….This will likely make governing even more difficult for Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and troubled times lie ahead in federal politics.”
Indeed, AfD might have swept to an astounding victory in Bavaria if the far-right vote there had not been split with a homegrown rightwing party called Free Voters. Together, they accumulated 30.4% of the vote, just a sliver behind the center-right CSU, which has ruled Bavaria for some seven decades. Yet Free Voters and its own firebrand leader, Hubert Aiwanger, seem likely to join CSU in a ruling coalition now in Bavaria.
SDZ commentators suggested that the “grand coalition,” under which Scholz predecessor Angela Merkel [“whom the Germans initially believed they could not do without”] governed and which her successor has so strongly lusted to reassemble, now seems even more improbable.
“A feeling of unease is spreading in Berlin, which is sometimes suggestive of emerging panic. Firstly, many problems seem so big that they can no longer be overcome with normal governance: war and inflation, weakening industry, paralyzing bureaucracy, illegal migration. Secondly, the extremist AfD is achieving frightening poll numbers, which raises concerns that democracy as such is in danger.”
Now, imagine what could happen next weekend in the country immediately to the east? And what could happen to Europe.
Poland: Still no shape
It may truly be the last chance for democracy in a keystone nation of Europe, the NATO alliance and especially the democratic coalition seeking to bolster Ukraine against the holocaust being unleashed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Tonight will be the final debate before Sunday’s national election in Poland. The leading opposition candidate—challenger Donald Tusk, himself a former Polish prime minister and more immediately president of the European Council—will be rolling the dice against incumbent neo-con, Jarosław Kaczyński.
Kaczyński, leader of the self-styled Law & Justice Party (PiS) has been ruling Poland throughout Russia’s war in Ukraine. And while he has paid lip service to western attitudes favoring Ukraine, in deference to the sympathies of most of his people, much of this could change.
Indeed, Kaczynski is taking ever so many leaves out of Donald Trump’s playbook. He’s simply not showing up for tonight’s last debate. He’d rather “spend time with voters” he says. Taking no chances on national television where he’s been known to meander sharply offscript, he is sending his Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki instead. As Poland’s leading daily, Wyborcza reported: “The whole of Poland is waiting for the debate on TVP, and the PiS president is going to Przysucha,” a village 100 miles or so south of Warsaw.
Law & Justice, really Poland’s answer to Germany’s AfD or France’s National Rally of Marine Le Pen, even entire countries like nearby Slovakia, which turned sharply to the right two week ago as Andelman Unleashed reported, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, are all part of a frightening new trend sweeping Europe. Poland, Europe’s fifth most populous nation, has been in the forefront of anti-immigrant confrontation in Europe (though willing to receive hordes of Ukraines at the start of the war). But PiS continues to paint Tusk as a stooge of the EU and Brussels.
Sunday’s election is “perceived as the last chance to reverse the process of democratic backsliding, through democratic means,” Jacek Kucharczyk, the president of the Executive Board at Warsaw’s Institute of Public Affairs, told CNN. “The concern here is that if PiS remains in power for another four years, they will close the gaps in the authoritarian system that they’ve been building for the last eight years.”
We’ll be back a week from today with the reportage and commentary on Poland and on critical elections in strife-torn Ecuador as well.
naw...no problem ... nada !
;-)))_
Wait til my column on the election itself, Hanna !!!
;-)
But you are exactly right ... thank you !