“Germany shifts to the right,” was Süddeutsche Zeitung’s headline on Sunday evening, October 8th, as centre-right and right-wing parties made huge gains in state elections held in the southern state of Bavaria and the western state of Hesse. Together, the two states account for around a quarter of the German population.
As we reported in our pre-election analysis, as expected, the opposition parties in the Berlin Bundestag capitalised on the weakness of the central government, led by the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the liberal FDP, as people are fed up with the mismanagement of the cost-of-living crisis, the economic effects of the war in Ukraine, and the migration crisis.
In Bavaria, the largest and one of Germany’s wealthiest states, centre-right CSU, which has governed the state continuously since 1957, maintained its vote share of five years ago, with 37% of voters backing the party. Its coalition partners, the conservative Free Voters increased their popularity from 11.6 to 15.8%, and the anti-immigration party, AfD—which is surging in the polls all across the nation—is now at 14.6% compared to 10.2% last time around.
Meanwhile, the Greens, SPD, and FDP all suffered losses, with the latter crashing out of the state parliament altogether.
CSU leader and Prime Minister of Bavaria Markus Söder, who has been critical of Germany’s welcoming policy towards migrants and the central government’s green agenda, said that the results in Bavaria give him a clear mandate for a strong and stable government. He said he would hold talks with the Free Voters party this week to continue the existing governing coalition.
Elections in Hesse painted a similar picture: CSU’s sister party, CDU—which has governed the state since 1999, and has also strongly criticised the rising number of migrants entering Germany—gained more than 7% points compared to the last elections, and received 34.6% of the votes. The AfD increased its vote share from 13.1 to 18.4%, its best-ever result in a western state. Here, too, the Left suffered, as the SPD and Greens both lost 5% of the voters, and FDP just about entered parliament, reaching the 5% threshold.
CDU leader Friedrich Merz—who has tried to shift the party more to the right after twenty years of the Merkel era—called the result in Hesse sensational, and said “unity and clear positions pay off. If we can continue to walk this path together, the [national coalition] chaos will come to a close by the 2025 federal elections at the latest.”
However, Hesse Prime Minister Boris Rhein will probably carry on governing with the Greens, with both CDU and CSU maintaining to uphold a so-called ‘firewall’ against AfD, deeming the party to be extreme, and excluding it from cooperation.
AfD party co-chairman Alice Weidel celebrated Sunday’s results, emphasising that “the citizens of Hesse and Bavaria have made it clear that they have had enough of disenfranchisement, dispossession and of a migration policy that can be justified by nothing.”
Lars Klingbeil, co-leader of the Social Democrats, tried to put the blame for poor results on external factors saying, that “many crises of recent years have contributed to the situation being what it is; that isn’t the (coalition’s) fault, but we must solve it”.
