As Olaf Scholz gathers alongside other European leaders on the beaches of Northern France tomorrow to commemorate 80 years since the allied invasion of Normandy, the German Chancellor may have another D-Day in mind. Tomorrow morning, the polls open across the continent for the European parliamentary elections.
Over the coming three days, voters in each EU member state will vote for candidates put forward by their home country’s national parties. The natural result of this model is that voters tend to cast their ballots based on domestic concerns, rather than what those MEPs might necessarily be able to do for them in Brussels. As such, for Scholz and his traffic light coalition, this is the first time Germans will be voting on their record in government – and likely also the first taste of what’s to come when Germany heads to the polls for its federal election in about 18 months’ time.
The AfD can take some comfort from the fact they are expected to win bigger than Scholz’s SPD
In the two and a half years since Scholz became Chancellor, barely a month has gone by without some parliamentary scrap between his SPD party and its FDP and Green party coalition partners. The parties have rowed over everything from how much aid to send to Ukraine and when, whether to ban combustion engine cars, replace boilers with heat pumps and how to rejuvenate the country’s stuttering economy. In short, there are very few issues the three parties have managed to agree on.
Unfortunately for Scholz, the German public has taken note – and blames him for the fallout. According to a poll conducted this weekend by ARD Deutschlandtrend, three quarters of those Germans surveyed are currently dissatisfied with the work of Scholz’s government.
Intriguingly, the same poll suggests that voters’ top concern going into the European elections is preserving peace in Europe. This reflects the long-standing fear of many Germans that, if provoked by Nato, Putin could extend the frontiers of his war beyond Ukraine and further into Europe. Scholz has consistently struggled to balance a nervous domestic mood with pressure from Nato allies to send ever more weapons and aid to Kyiv. His concession last Friday that Ukraine could use German-made weapons to strike military targets on Russian soil may well put paid to his efforts to portray himself as the ‘peace Chancellor’ and cost him at the ballot box.
Adding to Scholz’s domestic woes over the past two years has been the steady rise of the insurgent Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party. The AfD has cashed in on the debate over immigration, the seeds of which were sown by Scholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel in 2015 with her infamous ‘open door’ asylum policy when approximately one million migrants entered Germany in the course of a single summer. The AfD’s strong anti-migrant messaging is paying off: while immigration is a top priority for 17 per cent of German voters, according to ARD Deutschlandtrend, this rises to 46 per cent among those intending to vote for the far-right party over the coming days. It seems that many Germans view this as more than just a domestic issue: data from a poll conducted for the TV channel ZDF, 57 per cent of Germans want the EU to tighten up its refugee policy.
While the AfD entered 2024 with an all-time national polling high of 22 per cent, the party has recently taken a hit thanks to several scandals which have dented its reputation. The party’s lead candidate for the EU elections, Maximilian Krah, has repeatedly come under fire since April when the story broke that he had been questioned by the FBI on a trip to the US in December on suspicion of having received money from pro-Russian activists with ties to the Kremlin. Shortly after that one of his aides was arrested due to allegedly spying for China. The AfD’s leadership distanced themselves from Krah, but the rot had already set in and the party’s popularity began to drop. To make matters worse, in an interview in mid-May with the Italian paper La Repubblica, Krah stated he would ‘never say that anyone who wore an SS uniform was automatically a criminal’. Such Nazi-apologist rhetoric, particularly coming from a member of Germany’s most far-right party, has predictably gone down like a lead balloon at home.
Krah’s comments proved a step too far even for the AfD’s EU parliamentary faction partner, the far-right French National Rally party, whose leader Marine le Pen effectively kicked the AfD out of the Identity and Democracy faction both parties belong to. As a result, Krah stepped down from the party leadership and stopped campaigning – although too late to have his name removed from the ballot paper.
With many AfD supporters unimpressed with the shambolic nature of the party’s EU election campaign, as polling day dawns, they are predicted to win just 14.8 per cent of the vote share. This is a significant fall, but the party leadership can take some comfort from the fact they are expected to win bigger than Scholz’s SPD, which pollsters predict will take just 14.1 per cent of the vote.
Predictions for the other two incumbent traffic light parties look considerably grimmer. The Green party is projected to lose a larger vote share than any of the other parties combined, bringing it down to 14.2 per cent. Meanwhile, the FDP is predicted to win just 4 per cent of the vote. Were this the federal election, that would not even be enough to get them over the proportional representation threshold to hold any seats in the Bundestag.
Germany’s biggest winner this weekend will be the CDU/CSU party – currently the leading opposition party in Berlin. They are expected to win around 29 per cent of the vote share, and current polling suggests they would do even better were the federal election to be held now too. The left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), only set up in January, is likely to emerge as the underdog in this election – its first electoral test. The party is predicted to win 6 per cent, which bodes well for its chances at next year’s election.
Voting closes on Sunday night, with the results expected to trickle in through the night into Monday. However badly the SPD does in the election, Scholz still has a while yet before he has to face the German electorate in person. A lot can change between now and then. But few have much faith that Scholz can successfully turn things around.
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