The regional leader of the pro-border-control AfD party said his faction was “the clear winner of the evening” after the legacy centrist-globalist Christian Conservatives and Social Democrats recorded their worst results ever in Lower Saxony.
Provisional results show support for the sovereigntist, Eurosceptic, border-control Alternative for Germany (AfD) tripled in Sunday’s Lower Saxony elections to select hundreds of directly-elected mayors and other representatives.
The AfD jumped from an also-ran result of 4.6 per cent in 2021 to a headline-grabbing 15.9 per cent today. The resultant third-place finish is a major leap forward for the party in what is a comparatively wealthy Western German state far removed from the AfD’s normal centres of power in the East, and has again shaken the fragile governing coalition in Berlin, with even its safest areas no longer immune to the right-wing insurgents.
Every other major party lost support, including the long-dominant mainstream centre-right Christian Democrats who slipped nearly five points to 27 per cent, a first-place finish, but still their lowest result in post-war German history in Lower Saxony. The likewise establishment centre-left Social Democrats took an even worse battering, losing almost six points from the 30 per cent they achieved at the last election.
The regional Lower Saxony party leader for the AfD responded to the vote on Monday and reflected that, in terms of narrative, his party being the only major force to pick up support — and trebling it in just five years — means his party was “the clear winner of the evening”.
Local party chairman Ansgar Schledde said a lawfare attempt to hobble the AfD in Lower Saxony, where the party is being investigated by the state’s political police and where four of its candidates were banned from running for election altogether by the government on the basis of “doubts about their loyalty to the constitution”, has actually pushed voters to his party. He said the decision to ban some of his candidates had shown the public there was a need for a “corrective” against this anti-democratic behaviour by state agents, reports Die Welt.
Inevitably, the receipt of record lows on Sunday for both mainstream political parties governing Germany at the national-federal level, has yet again called into question the leadership of Chancellor Friedrich Merz. National AfD leader Alice Weidel said the government’s weakness means the best route forward now is a snap national election to clear out Parliament and start again.
She said: “Given the coalition’s dismal state, new elections would be the cleanest solution from our perspective… The people must now decide who should lead the country out of this crisis”.
Damagingly for Chancellor Merz, even his own CDU representatives seem reluctant to say they think he should stay. The Lower Saxony regional party chief, Sebastian Lechner, demurred from even saying he supported the Chancellor and, when asked, replied that he was only focused on the next set of elections taking place in days’ time and that “there must be political change in Berlin”.
Germany’s election season continues through this month. Lower Saxony will vote again to select the members of its state parliament, while next weekend, more local elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin are to be held.