Both the centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the right-wing, antiglobalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) made significant gains in elections held on Sunday, February 11th, in Berlin. Newly released opinion polls also suggest that Germany has veered sharply to the right, despite multiple attempts by the leftist government to stigmatise the AfD.
Recently orchestrated demonstrations against the ‘far right’ in Berlin were claimed by the media to show public opinion opposing the AfD—but the election results tell a different story.
Parliamentary (Bundestag) elections held in 2021 had to be repeated on Sunday in 455 out of the 2,256 polling stations in the capital, Berlin, after a German Constitutional Court ruling in December determined there had been multiple errors in the vote count in several Berlin constituencies.
The repeat election in the aforementioned districts resulted in CDU gaining 20.6% of the votes, almost 7 points more than in the 2021 elections. AfD’s share rose by almost 6 points to 12.6%. The largest governing party, the social democrats, suffered a heavy loss, dropping by 8 points to 14.6%. The smallest coalition member, the liberal FDP, fell from 9.1% to 3.3%, while the Greens were the only governing force able to increase their votes, by 0.4 points to 27.6%, remaining the strongest party in Berlin.
The results are a reflection of German society’s disillusionment with the left-liberal government that has been in power for more than two years and has inflicted a string of unpopular policies upon its citizens, culminating with a green transition agenda and tax hikes that have driven farmers and many other enraged voters to protest in the streets of the country’s largest cities.
The result is all the more humiliating for the government as the vote was held in a city that is traditionally left-wing, where parties like the AfD previously had not been able to attract the attention of voters.
The Left has doubled down in recent weeks on its attempts to discredit and vilify the AfD which has risen strongly in opinion polls. A recent report on the AfD by a state-supported left-wing media outlet turned out to be full of inconsistencies and false accusations. It was used as an excuse to organise nationwide protests in January against ‘far-right extremism.’
As conservative publication Nius concluded after the Berlin elections:
Berliners, despite all the “demonstrations against the Right,” and the protest against the AfD, are punishing the government and are increasingly turning to parties to the right of the centre.
Kristin Brinker, leader of the AfD’s Berlin wing tweeted:
More and more voters realise that pragmatic and rational political solutions are better than pro-government demonstrations against the opposition.
The latest opinion polls also highlight how the government has lost the trust of its citizens. Polls point to the three members of the coalition taking only 31% of all the votes if elections were to be held now, with FDP crashing out of the parliament altogether. The CDU/CSU alliance is still polling the strongest (30%), with AfD remaining in second place (20.5%), and the newly established anti-globalist left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) easily entering the Bundestag with voter support in the poll of 7.5%.
