Members of Germany’s traditional parties in Germany will not sleep well following the results of elections to the European Parliament. At the time of writing, every party within the governing traffic-light coalition lost votes. The Greens dropped significantly to 12%, having taken 20.5% of the vote in 2019. The Social Democrats “only” went down by a couple of percentage points, but their overall share of 14% was nonetheless their worst result in a federal election since 1887.
Even more worrisome for Olaf Scholz and co., however, are the underlying trends emerging from these elections. Although the conservative CDU/CSU alliance achieved first place with 30% of the vote, this was still somewhat disappointing given just how tired the population has become with the present government. CDU leader Friedrich Merz may not have lost votes, but his party’s vote share only went up by just over a percentage point, despite the members of the coalition government dropping a combined 11 points.
So where did those voters go? Some of them shifted to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which went up by 5.2 points and came in second after the conservatives. Given the absolutely catastrophic final weeks before the election, this should not have been possible. The party’s top candidate Maximilian Krah had to suspend his campaign and the AfD was kicked out of the ID group in the European Parliament, due to comments he made about the Waffen-SS — and that’s before getting to the spying and corruption allegations. Yet voters were undeterred, demonstrating that the AfD now has a solid base of around 15% which is willing to vote for the party under almost any circumstances.