State elections in Thüringen and Saxony deliver another humiliating defeat for the sclerotic and incapable German political establishment

After eight months of near-constant media hysteria, desperate Interior Ministry campaigns against the political opposition and unceasing warnings from every last establishment political figure about the crypto-fascist antidemocratic menace of Alternative für Deutschland, Thüringen and Saxony have elected new state parliaments. All of that hue and cry, all of those protests against “the right,” all those false panics and all that disingenuous saccharine moralising was for nothing. The AfD emerged as the strongest party in Thüringen, with 32.8% of the vote; and as the second-strongest party in Saxony, with 30.6% of the vote. The results represent an intensely humiliating defeat for the parties of the coalition government, just months after their earlier humiliation in the EU elections. The SPD, the Greens and the FDP together could claim only 13.3% support in Saxony and 10.4% in Thüringen. It is a repudiation of historic proportions.

Our betters are very angry about this. Bettina Schausten, editor-in-chief of the state media broadcaster ZDF, had this to say on television last night:

On 1 September 1939, the Second World War began with the Wehrmacht’s attack on Poland. Germany brought suffering and death to the whole world, and murdered 6 million Jews. On 1 September 2024, 85 years later to the day, the strongest political force in the German state of Thüringen has become a party which, according to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, is proven to be right-wing extremist, with a candidate at the helm who talks like a fascist and can be called one. This is hard to bear and makes this first of September a political milestone and a warning to the postwar generations.

More than 30% of voters in Thuringia and Saxony voted for the far right. The vast majority of them are not neo-Nazis, but – and this is no less shocking – they don’t care about voting for the far right.

Bettina Schausten raging at phantom Nazis.

Former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has called the election results “catastrophic.” The SPD Finance Minister of Brandenburg, Katrin Lange, with an eye towards the upcoming 22 September elections in her own state, has demanded that SPD leaders stop appearing in talk shows, because every time they do, the voters get even more tired of them. Thüringen FDP chief Thomas Kemmerich has called on his own party to leave the federal coalition government. “In my view,” he said, “the coalition is damaging Germany and has also damaged the FDP locally and probably nationwide.” Left Party leader Martin Schirdewan warned his colleagues “not to panic” in the face of their historically dismal showing.

Whenever I post about elections, many people show up to tell me that they don’t matter, that especially whatever election I’m talking about doesn’t matter and that nothing will change. These people would be well advised to direct their wisdom to the armies of journalists, public opinion manipulators, fact-checkers, legal strategists, constitutional protectors and establishment politicians, all of whom appear to take a very different view. In this post, I will explain in detail why the Saxon and Thuringian elections matter, and why they have so many people shitting their pants right now.

Germany is governed by a political oligarchy that is formally arranged in a system of interlacing establishment parties. Together, the establishment parties function like a cartel, competing with each other for votes and taking carefully coordinated positions on a limited array of issues to limit the options of the electorate. Since Angela Merkel opened the borders in 2015, the cartel system has been bleeding support to the AfD, who are hated and smeared as fascists not because they are evil National Socialists, but because their growing strength threatens the cartel system itself. As the establishment parties grow weaker and the AfD gathers strength, it becomes harder and harder for the oligarchy to achieve the parliamentary majorities that are necessary to control the state apparatus.

Here are the final, official election results for Thüringen …

… and here is the distribution of seats in the state parliament:

The Greens did not even make it over the 5% hurdle for representation, and the Left Party (Die Linke) have been neatly split by the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). The old SPD-Left-Green minority government is history, but who will govern in their place? To maintain their cordon sanitaire against the AfD, the CDU will have to enter a coalition with the wildly unpopular SPD and with the hard socialists and anti-Atlanticists of the BSW. Even that extreme compromise, however, will not be enough for a majority government, because the CDU, the BSW and the SPD together are one seat short of a majority. They will have to strike some further arrangement of toleration with the Left Party, all merely to discredit themselves over the next four years in a weak politically incompatible coalition that exists not to achieve any concrete goals, and not to make anybody’s life better, but only to keep the AfD out of power. Nor will it be possible to shut out the AfD entirely; their 32 seats are more than enough to constitute a blocking minority. They’re strong enough to obstruct amendments to the state constitution and certain judicial appointments – all opportunities at which they can demand concessions.

In their attempt to wall the AfD out, the CDU in Thüringen have walled themselves in. The party is slowly destroying itself, and after four years governing with social democrats and leftists their popularity will only have eroded further. That is why the Thüringen election matters. The wheels are coming off the party cartel machine here, right before our eyes.

Things are not quite as grim for the cartel parties in Saxony, but they’re far from great. There, the urban population in Dresden and Leipzig is sufficient to keep the Greens in parliament, if just barely:

A last-minute “correction” to the election results has deprived AfD of a blocking minority in the Saxon Landtag, but the prospects for the party cartel system are far from rosy. The current CDU-SPD-Green coalition is now three seats short of a majority.

The CDU will have to court the BSW as a new coalition partner, and here they’ll face all the same longer-term problems as their counterparts in Thüringen.

As a direct result of unfavourable elections and its ongoing schemes of triangulation to maintain a lock on power, the party cartel system has largely lost its ability to govern effectively. This is the central problem with the traffic light coalition under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and it will be the curse of whatever coalitions emerge to govern Thüringen and Saxony as well. What is more, the cornerstone of the cartel system – the CDU – is slowly being ground to dust by the cordon sanitaire. This is a self-reinforcing failure. To keep the AfD out of power, the CDU must govern in ever larger and more impotent coalitions with leftist parties, which coalitions drive it ever further from its right-leaning base and steer more support to the AfD, which the CDU can only counter by entering still more compromising coalition arrangements.

The East Germans are often maligned as backward rubes whose experience with the DDR means they somehow don’t understand democracy, but in fact their voting patterns are entirely typical in the European context. It is the West Germans who are the anomaly here, and whose misplaced ancestral loyalty to the old parties makes grand triangulatory coalitions a viable strategy in the first place. This strategy has now begun to break down in the East. It will take a bit longer for it to fail also in the West, but make no mistake – it is doomed.