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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer directs the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution
Late summer in German politics is jokingly called Saure-Gurken-Zeit, or pickle-time: an old name for the hot and sultry days when Berlin grocers started brining ripe cucumbers, and newspapers had to print ridiculous stories on their front pages because everyone else was on holiday, including politicians.
Not this year. Anxieties in the capital are running high, because two elections in the eastern German states of Saxony and Thuringia on September 1, and a third in Brandenburg on September 22, look set to detonate an earthquake in German politics — just one year ahead of the next Bundestag elections.
A glance at the polls explains the jitters. In Saxony, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which polls nationally at 17 per cent, is in second place at 30 per cent, hard on the heels of the conservative Christian Democrats. But in Thuringia and in Brandenburg, the AfD is in first place, at 30 and 24 per cent respectively. The new hard-left Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW, named after its founder) polls at 7-8 per cent nationally. But it gets 11 in Saxony, 19 in Thuringia and 17 in Brandenburg.
In other words, two openly anti-system parties that nationally get a quarter of the poll vote are likely to receive a collective share of between 41 and 49 per cent in these three states. Both are Eurosceptic, anti-Nato and anti-American. Both are pro-Russian, and against supporting Ukraine. That said, neither will work, much less govern, with the other. But they can cause havoc all the same.
The AfD has professionalised and consolidated — but also outpaced most of its European peers in its radicalism. It trades in neo-Nazi tropes, associates with violent militants and is supported by a broad network of extreme-right media, associations and activists. A German higher court has confirmed the domestic intelligence services’ assessment that the party’s chapters in Saxony and Thuringia are “proven rightwing extremist”. The journalist Mariam Lau calls the AfD’s striking inability to shake off the Nazi past “political Tourette’s syndrome”.
BSW’s surge since its inception in January, and its unique tax-the-rich-and-throw-out-migrants fusion of leftwing economics and national conservatism have startled Germans. Above all, they are mesmerised by Wagenknecht, its firebrand populist leader, an admirer of Stalin who favours sharp corporate tailoring. In June’s European parliament elections, BSW managed to draw voters not just from the AfD, but from across the entire German political landscape.
The outlook for all other parties is between dire and disastrous. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the Greens and the Free Democrats, who form Berlin’s unhappy government coalition, face potential political extinction in all three states. They are polling either under or just above the parliamentary entry threshold of 5 per cent — except for the SPD in Brandenburg, where they field the state premier. Governments have imploded for less in other countries. But as there is no clear constitutional or political path to new elections, the coalition appears condemned to drag itself to the finish line.
Yet the CDU also faces nasty dilemmas. It has vetoed any co-operation with either the AfD or the post-communist Die Linke party, leaving BSW as a potential coalition partner in all three eastern states, and the sole available partner in Saxony and Thuringia. It’s an unthinkable pairing at the national level.
But many conservatives in eastern Germany think otherwise. And Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader who wants to become chancellor in 2025, still needs his party to anoint him as candidate. Cue a roiling internal debate over whether or not to permit the state CDU parties to enter into pragmatic coalitions.
Remarkably, Wagenknecht is upping the ante. She categorically rejects entering into coalitions with any party supporting military aid for Ukraine, or the stationing of US missiles in Germany: policies endorsed by both the government and the CDU in Berlin, but deeply unpopular in the eastern states. Little imagination is required to see that the conservatives could end up damaged and divided whatever they decide.
In this context, a recent social media post by the New Right thinker Benedikt Kaiser describing the AfD’s electoral strategy for Thuringia is instructive: “play on the CDU’s contradictions, work towards implosion, pulverise CDU in the next election”.
Germany’s September elections could determine not just the governability of three eastern states, but of the entire country. It is time to understand that its democracy is under attack.