Germany's AfD surges towards its super election year
The 2017 German election came as a shock to many international observers. Prognostications abounded that Europe’s right-wing nationalist wave was fading, in the wake of significant overestimation for candidates like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands or Marine Le Pen in France earlier that year.
But for Germany’s AfD, the election was a triumph. The nearly 13% of the vote the party secured was enough for third place. Earlier in the campaign, polls had seen them receding into single digits. It was an outcome that set in motion momentum for the AfD, culminating in heights exceeding 18% in polls.
After 2017’s general election, state elections in East Germany posed the clearest opportunity for an AfD breakthrough. While polls at times showed them placing first in Brandenburg and Saxony, however, the outcomes had mixed implications for the party. Indeed, the AfD were near their polling highs across the board in the results- but a “useful vote” effect buoyed incumbent parties, relegating them to second place.
Nationally, the AfD stagnated. Then the pandemic happened, and soon the party peeked below double digits. In the 2021 election they receded, but avoided collapse with a result of around 10%.
Ahead of new state elections in East Germany next year, however, the AfD is back at an average of 17% in polling. Multiple polls now see the party in second place or tied, and close to polling records.
Moreover, polls once again have the AfD tied or leading in all three states going to the polls in 2024: Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia. According to the latest survey in Thuringia, the party has a 6 point lead over the Left, which currently governs as part of a supply and confidence deal with the CDU.
That situation underscores the AfD’s strategy in whittling down red-lines around cooperation with them. Nationally, the prospect of the AfD even providing support to a governing coalition is considered extremely unlikely.
In East Germany, though, high scores for the AfD make it increasingly difficult to see agreements that don’t reach all the way across the political spectrum. The AfD hopes that, eventually, parties like the CDU will calculate it’s easier to work with them than against them.
It’s also worth remembering why the CDU is cooperating with the Left in the first place. After the AfD attempted to supply votes to an FDP premier in Thuringia, mass protests forced him to resign almost immediately. While some voices within the CDU are more amenable to the AfD, the red-lines are still prominent.
It would be a marathon for the AfD to translate mid-2023 polling to 2024 state election victories. But at the moment, the numbers are trending in their direction.
Victory for the AfD in East Germany next year would be a victory for the party’s “even further right” wing (known, literally, as The Wing, or “Der Flügel” in German). Some of the party’s most extreme figures hail from East German states, like Der Flügel figurehead Björn Höcke, the leader of the AfD in Thuringia.
Given all of the context, it’s no understatement to say the next few years could be an inflection point in German politics.
(An overview of all German polling can be found here.)
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