Image source, EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock
- author, Damien McGuinness
- role, BBC correspondent
- Reported by Berlin
“We demand a vote of confidence and new elections,” Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, told reporters on Monday. “People have had enough.”
Germany’s far-right party is celebrating after coming in second in the European Parliament elections, beating Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) with 16% of the vote.
The AfD’s results were bigger than expected, as their election campaign was hit by a series of scandals, including allegations of money laundering, funding from the Kremlin and espionage for China.
In the end, the AfD had to campaign without its two main candidates, Maximilian Kurler and Petr Byström, who were under investigation for ties to Russia and China.
For Kurrah, the defining moment came when he downplayed Nazi crimes and said that not all SS officers were criminals.
The AfD has also become too harmful for France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who expelled it from the right-wing European Parliament group Identity and Democracy.
Weidel, clearly seeking reconciliation with far-right allies in Europe, has excluded Kula from the AfD’s EU delegation in an effort to improve the party’s image.
Party leaders have called the scandal a “media campaign.”
Judges who ruled against the AfD in court and intelligence agencies investigating the party have been accused of being politically motivated.
This victimhood narrative seems to have worked.
While the government’s lofty election campaign claimed to “defend democracy”, the AfD poured its resources into TikTok videos, witty slogans and simple-sounding solutions.
“There are real problems in the country that need to be solved, not insulted,” AfD co-chair Tino Krupala said. “We don’t have the support of voters.”
He may be right: In eastern Germany, where the AfD is particularly radical, it often leads in opinion polls and where the far-right wins the most votes.
And the party managed to boost its support among young voters who perhaps enjoyed rebelling against mainstream German standards of acceptability.
Perhaps the AfD succeeded not in spite of its scandals but because of them.
The ruling coalition is in disarray and trying to figure out what went wrong.
On Monday, one SPD leader called the result a “painful humiliation.”
The Conservatives will no doubt be pleased with their 30% lead, but given the government’s unpopularity it is hardly a surprise.
In eastern Germany, where important local elections are being held in September, it came in second to the AfD.
And in parliamentary elections, these numbers will make it difficult to form a stable coalition government.
The result will give CDU leader Friedrich Merz a boost in his attempt to drag the party into a more conservative post-Merkel era and lay the foundations for his bid to become Germany’s next chancellor next year.
But the only real winners in Germany this week are the populists.
