What The Hell America!

The big losers from Sunday’s election were the parties in outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. His Social Democrats, slumping by 9 percent since the last federal election in 2021, scored their worst result since 1887. His government collapsed in November after his finance minister, Christian Lindner of the FDP, held firm in resisting all calls to increase borrowing. The FDP lost 7 percent and won zero seats, and Lindner was forced into retirement. The other party in the coalition, the Greens, slipped back slightly.

The winners were mainly on the Right, notably the Christian Democrats (known as the Union, because of their partnership with Bavaria’s Christian Social Union), though its 4 percent rise was well below preelection expectations. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany doubled their score, and the left-wing party Die Linke did almost the same, from a lower base. Former Die Linke leader Wagenknecht’s breakaway party was only founded in 2023 and thus increased its vote from zero to 4.97 percent, which left it 13,000 votes short of a place in parliament.

Among voters who told pollsters that they are struggling economically, the Alternative for Germany was well ahead of other parties, and well above its 21 percent national score. Greens did only half as well in this group as their general vote (with 6 percent), and in this same poll its voters were only half as likely as the general population to say that they are struggling. The Social Democrats and Christian Democrats each did worse among this group, and Die Linke and Sahra Wagenknecht’s party better.

So are economic difficulties explaining the far-right vote? Or are these voters just complaining more? Without doubt, such difficulties could correspond to different positions and demands: a call for lower taxes and less green regulation, as libertarian elements of the party want, or else express difficulties faced with inflation and poor wage growth. Asked why they voted for the AfD, its voters didn’t prioritize economic issues but migration.

It could be argued that “ranking” issues like this falsely separates them. Criticism of migration policy is bound up with economic attitudes and positions, for instance in what Arlie Hochschild calls the “waiting line” dynamic: the sense of being passed over in favor of undeserving others. Poor economic circumstances may feed openness to a party that others call extremist, and a supporter of such a party would seem unlikely to tell a pollster that they are happy with their economic situation. Even so, the AfD’s massive vote among blue-collar and unemployed voters would suggest that this party is exploiting economic grievances.

Left-wing party Die Linke increased its vote among all age groups and occupations, taking almost 9 percent nationally. It enjoyed a massive spike among first-time voters (27 percent) and under-twenty-fives (25 percent). Its strongest group in polling was young women in cities (35 percent). In all these categories, it was the biggest single party. It was also the biggest party in Berlin (20 percent) and won seats in the former West for the first time. Its vote among elderly rural men was much poorer (4 percent), but still higher than its national average polling score only a few weeks ago.

Ahead of this election, newly elected coleader Ines Schwerdtner told Jacobin about how she hoped to reach out to working-class voters. While the party’s vote among workers increased, around as much as the party’s national average score, and it did even better among the unemployed, these figures suggest nothing like the rise that the AfD enjoyed among these groups.

Many preelection comment pieces commented on alienated youth shifting to the far right, and cartoons showed Germans in their twenties shocking their parents by dusting off “granddad’s uniform.” Undoubtedly, young Germans are less likely to be won to the traditional parties, and this time also seemed turned off by the Greens, perhaps put off by the government’s economic performance as well as foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s doggedly pro-Israel stance. Yet the youth vote was also massively split by gender. Among young women, Die Linke was easily in first place, with over one-third of the vote. Young men split heavily in favor of the right-wing parties.

If Die Linke seems to have mobilized many voters from other softly “progressive” parties, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) tried to do something else: to compete with the AfD with a pitch to the working and lower-middle classes, and not focusing on their more left-wing layers. This leaned heavily on culture-war themes, but also on economic issues around inflation and, connected to this, the war in Ukraine. BSW combined pacifist positions (sometimes taking a stronger pro-Palestinian line than Die Linke, and opposing all arms shipments to Kyiv) with the call to halt migration, and some social democratic positions on welfare and the economy.

What this didn’t do was divide the AfD’s existing base. Only around one in eighty 2021 voters for that party switched to Wagenknecht’s BSW, which instead mainly won over switchers from the Social Democrats and Die Linke. For comparison’s sake, this was smaller even than the number who made such a quixotic choice as moving from the Christian Democrats to Die Linke: more something in the realm of statistical noise than a basis for a political strategy.

Defenders of the BSW will say it stopped these otherwise alienated voters from shifting to the AfD, notably among older Germans. Alas, it largely did so through a campaign that fed the AfD’s own talking points rather than combat them. While today part of the state governments of Brandenburg (led by the Social Democrats) and Thuringia (together with the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats), this party’s insurgent strategy seems to have run into major difficulty already.