Höcke’s Ideological Victory

In Thuringia, AfD’s victory was uncontestable. It received 33 percent of votes, almost ten points ahead of the CDU. This was especially remarkable insofar as its state-level leader, Björn Höcke, has twice been sentenced for using a Nazi slogan: even the usually cautious German justice system has long established that he can be called a fascist. Höcke has, understandably, become the embodiment of the threat of right-wing radicalism. Aside from front covers in German media, he has even received his share of ironically framed attacks in HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

For all the attention on Höcke, he is not particularly popular among AfD voters, even in Thuringia. While it scored fully one-third of the vote, according to post-vote polling only 24 percent of voters were satisfied with Höcke’s own efforts. He also failed to win his new constituency in eastern Thuringia despite leaving his own one to have better chances there. The AfD’s Thuringian chapter has itself undergone serious internal struggles in recent months. This wasn’t an obstacle on election day — but shows that the results are far more an AfD victory than Höcke’s personal triumph.

Höcke’s real victory lies in his allies’ success shaping AfD to their liking through the inner-party platform “Der Flügel” (“The Wing”). After multiple changes at the head of the party, the initial focus on Euroscepticism at the time of AfD’s foundation in 2013 was progressively replaced by openly völkisch messages and, more recently, not-so-secret plans to deport millions of noncitizens and even ethnic-minority Germans. Although Höcke has not closed the door to running for chancellor someday, he would scare off too many voters (especially in western Germany) for AfD to nominate him.

After the elections in Thuringia, all the other parties announced they would not reach coalition agreements with AfD. Still, it will hold indirect power. With thirty-two out of the eighty-eight seats, AfD controls well above one-third of the regional parliament and enjoys a so-called “Sperrminorität,” or blocking minority.

There is by now considerable research on the dangers that might follow. The AfD can prevent the new parliament from dissolving, changing the constitution, or appointing new judges to the regional constitutional court without its agreement. How it will put this new power to use remains to be seen.

For now, the AfD has forced all the other parties into a tight spot. The CDU has a national-level policy forbidding coalitions with either the AfD or Die Linke. The CDU candidate in Thuringia, Mario Voigt, fearing a loss of votes to either the Left or Right if he took a clearer stance on coalition partners, spent the whole campaign sticking to this principle of “double incompatibility.” Plus, for a while, it appeared that the rise of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), the party founded last January by the ex-Die Linke politician of the same name, could rescue the Thuringian CDU from this conundrum.

The election results, however, left even the combined forces of the CDU, BSW, and Social Democrats (SPD) one seat short of a parliamentary majority. During the last five years, Ramelow has led a minority government with the SPD and the Greens, which often received parliamentary support from the CDU on key issues such as approving the budget. Conversely, the CDU used its majority with the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the AfD to approve a tax cut in Thuringia. The Greens and the FDP (which together with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s SPD form the federal-level government coalition) have no representation at all in the new Thuringian parliament.

A possible option is a minority government led by Voigt with extra-governmental support from Die Linke. The range of alternatives is certainly limited. Still, such an arrangement would reinforce the AfD’s standard discourse, according to which all non-AfD politicians are obsessed with power and ready to reach coalitions that make little ideological sense to subvert the “will of the people” and isolate AfD. Höcke routinely states that Germany is on the brink of collapse and in 2017 deemed the AfD “the last peaceful opportunity” to save the country. But there is no reason to believe he will not have the strategic patience to wait in the opposition for an even more propitious election opportunity.

The Wagenknecht Factor

If one of the election night’s winners was AfD, the other was Sahra Wagenknecht and her BSW. Whereas Die Linke has remained committed to the defense of asylum rights (an ever-more unpopular position in Germany), Wagenknecht reacted to the recent terrorist attack in Solingen by saying that “those who allow uncontrolled migration will face uncontrollable violence.” Wagenknecht’s calls to restrict immigration and stop military aid for Ukraine have been key to her success. Also important has been her criticism of the measures against the COVID-19 epidemic taken by the last two German governments.

Furthermore, Wagenknecht has adopted a message about the need for a strong social state that the neoliberal elements in AfD’s program cannot accommodate. Wagenknecht might once have been the leader of the Communist Platform within Die Linke. In crafting her messages, though, she has behaved like the quintessential capitalist searching for a gap in the market. She might also have discovered that agitating the population against migrants is easier than convincing people of the ills of capitalism.

And yet, BSW remains diffuse enough for voters to project onto the party what they would like to see. One thing is for certain about BSW: it will be the party that Wagenknecht wants it to be. Although Wagenknecht has not herself run as a candidate for BSW in any election, she appears in most of the party’s election placards (and it is, after all, named after her personally). This has been a constant since the European Parliament elections, where BSW scored 6.2 percent of the vote in its first election bid.

The personalism of BSW was all the more obvious when I visited Eisenach, Thuringia, on election day. After all, the city’s mayor, Katja Wolf, was BSW’s candidate for president of Thuringia. While Wagenknecht’s face populated BSW’s large election placards in Eisenach, Wolf could only be seen in smaller, less numerous ones.

BSW finished third in both Thuringia and Saxony, with 16 percent and 12 percent, respectively. In both states, BSW had relatively similar results across rural and urban areas. This contrasts with the AfD, which traditionally over-performs in rural areas, and Die Linke, whose strongholds have become even more focused on the cities with the loss of votes to BSW. It was thanks to the win in two election districts in Leipzig, the most populated city in Saxony, that Die Linke will be represented in the new Saxon parliament despite falling below the 5 percent threshold.

One of Wagenknecht’s stated objectives when founding BSW was to offer a new option to those who were thinking about voting for AfD “out of anger or desperation.” On this account, the party has failed. Former Die Linke voters contributed the largest share of votes to BSW in Thuringia and Saxony. In Thuringia, where the AfD had received three times as many votes as the SPD in the previous election, the number of former voters of these parties who moved to BSW this time was similar. BSW, however, has been more successful in mobilizing nonvoters. Some of them might have voted for AfD had BSW not been an option. Overall, BSW does particularly well among women and older people, the reverse image of AfD.

Two Elections With Germany-Wide Consequences

Government formation will be incredibly complicated in Thuringia, but the situation is far from simple in Saxony, either. The current governing coalition of CDU, SPD, and Greens does not have a majority anymore. On the campaign trail, state president Kretschmer said he didn’t want to repeat the former government with the Greens. Still, if the numbers had made this possible, he would have been in a better negotiating position. He has now been left with a single option: a government made of CDU, BSW, and SPD, which would have sixty-six seats out of one hundred twenty. There is no love lost between the CDU and BSW, and even less with Wagenknecht, who has announced she will negotiate for the BSW herself. This is an uncommon move in a country where parties’ regional chapters enjoy considerable autonomy.

Wagenknecht’s demands that regional governments in Thuringia and Saxony position themselves against weapon deliveries for Ukraine and the stationing of US mid-range missiles in Germany raise concerns among leading CDU members, especially in western Germany. There are voices within the party against reaching agreements with BSW, but the CDU is not in a position to pick and choose partners while also shunning the AfD. Friedrich Merz, who has a good chance of becoming chancellor in 2025, faces his most complicated moment since he took over the national CDU leadership in 2022. No definitive decision about coalitions will probably be taken before September 22, when regional elections take place in Brandenburg.

The CDU can at least celebrate the bad results for the federal government parties in Thuringia and Saxony. They all lost votes, especially the FDP, although none of them had been historically strong in the two states. The real election defeat for the government parties came in the European elections, where the three parties combined did not reach even one-third of the vote. That election, with only 2.7 percent of the votes going to Die Linke, also showed the depth of the left-wing party’s crisis. One of the issues that most worries it, and with good reason, is the rapidly declining number of people who believe that Die Linke is the best party to secure social justice. The percentage of voters seeing Die Linke in this role decreased by half in Thuringia and two-thirds in Saxony.

There is no shortage of people who want to see Die Linke out of the next German parliament. Internal rivalries in the party, also after the exit of Wagenknecht and her closest associates, have offered them too easy a target. Die Linke will hold its party congress in Halle next month, electing a new leadership. The party will need to make good use of its greatest asset, the rising number of party members after Wagenknecht left Die Linke, to reenter the German parliament.

Around seven hundred journalists followed the regional elections from the parliament in Erfurt to report on the first AfD victory in a German state. Most of them are based in Berlin, and the discussion these last few days has shifted to the consequences of the regional elections for German national politics. The two-thirds of voters who did not choose a far-right party in Thuringia and Saxony, however, will have to live with these results — absent a surprise in the form of new elections. It has previously been observed that strong election results for the far-right are accompanied by an increase in violence by right-wing extremists. That has been the case in Sonneberg, in Thuringia, where the first district municipal official from the AfD was elected in June 2023.

Scholz first reacted to the election results by saying that they were “bitter” and that “the gloomy predictions regarding the SPD did not come to pass,” by which he meant that the party had not been forced out of the regional parliaments. Meanwhile, Merz returned to the campaign trail in Brandenburg by blaming migrants for the poor state of Germany’s public services. Judging by their weak responses, it seems that Thuringia and Saxony cannot look to Berlin for help in containing the far right’s advance.