This is the second time in a few days that Olaf Scholz finds itself coming face to face with reality. In the beginning there was the Solingen massacre and the perverse effects of indiscriminate acceptance. Then came the victory in Thuringia of theAfd and the sensational exploit in Saxony. However, if in the first case the German Chancellor, albeit late, reacted with the political realism of someone who understood that he had made a mistake, promising new anti-immigration rules in total breach with Merkel’s line; in the second case the SPD seems not to have realized the message coming from the voters of the East. And so it decides to close up like a hedgehog.
The vote confirmed the unpopularity of the traffic light executive: the chancellor’s party in Thuringia came in only fifth, with a paltry 6.1% of the vote, while the Greens and Liberals did not even pass the 5% threshold. Put together, the government parties did not even reach half the votes collected by the AfD (32.8%) despite accusations of Nazi nostalgia. The tragedy, for Olaf, is that apart from the CdU (stuck at 23.6%), even on the left the “populist”, pro-Russian and anti-immigrant theses of Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW prevail. The results in Saxony do not differ much: the CDU obtained 31.9% of the votes, the AfD 30.6%, then the BSW with 11.8%, the SPD with 7.3% and the Greens at 5.1%.
After a few hours of silence, Scholz took to Instagram to comment on the collapse not only of the SPD but also of all the parties that form the government coalition (social democrats, liberals and environmentalists). “Bitter” results, to which however the Chancellor reacts in the manner of Emmanuel Macron: by sticking his head in the sand. “Our country cannot and must not get used to this,” he said. “The AfD is damaging Germany. It is weakening the economy, dividing society and ruining the reputation of our country.” Hence the invitation to “all democratic parties” to “form stable governments without right-wing extremists“. Nothing more and nothing less than what is happening in France, a strategy that however risks acting only on the symptoms without going deeper to understand the reasons for the mass vote towards extreme parties. Be they right or left.
The truth is that the Germany she has already “got used” to the idea of theAfd that gets a lot of votes. But not because the populist leaders have deceived the people or carried out a coup d’état, but because of a banal reaction of the voters to the wrong policies of those who have governed them until now. In Saxony and in Thuringia. But also and above all in Berlin, where the knot immigration it has tightened so much around the government’s neck that it really risks strangling it. Scholz’s mistake it all depends on thinking that calling for a “democratic coalition” against the AfD can serve to kill at birth what the SPD considers a weed, but which is now well-rooted. Especially in the East. If today the CDU, SPD, Liberals and Greens formed governments in the Lander excluding the first party, a bit like what is happening in Paris against Le Pen, what will happen tomorrow? Does Scholz really think that “postponing” the problem can be solved?
In reality, the risk is to amplify it. Providing populists with the dialectical argument to fight against a presumptuous power that barricades itself in ivory towers, ignoring the vote of 30% of the population. It is in fact probably wrong to affirm, as the co-leader of Alternatives for GermanyAlice Weidel, that Scholz should “pack his bags and leave his seat”. But it would be equally foolish to pretend that nothing has happened, ignore the alarm raised by voters and raise a wall against the AfD. Tino Chrupalla, another of the far-right leaders, says he is ready to seek convergences with the CDU (on border security and deportations) and – in some cases – even with the left of the BSW (such as school policies). It is not certain that it will not happen, given that the German centre-right has repeatedly opened up in the past to the possibility of seeking agreements with the AfD. We will see.
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