Trouble for Germany’s Scholz Is Portended in Three State Elections Set for Sunday

BERLIN — Three of Germany’s eastern states will head to the polls — two of them Sunday — in an election that is expected to surface voters’ stark dissatisfaction with Chancellor Scholz’s leadership and repudiate Berlin’s tripartite government coalition.Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg — all in the formerly communist German Democratic Republic — are bastions of political extremes and fertile ground for voters on the left and right to express dissatisfaction with the middle.Germany’s mainstream parties have forsworn coalition negotiations with the hard-right Alternative for Germany, known by its German abbreviation AfD, raising the possibility of the party garnering the most total votes but remaining outside of a governing coalition.That refusal, though, could set up the fledgling Alliance Sahra Wagenkneckt party, initially a hard-left splinter group, for its first major win: joining a state-level government coalition.Polling indicates that support for the AfD surged to 30 percent in Thuringia and tied at 30 percent with the center-right Christian Democrats in Saxony. Both Thuringia and Saxony hold state-wide elections on Sunday, while Brandenburgers go to the polls on September 22.AfD voters, whose party was originally founded in 2013, initially coalesced around Euroskepticism. The party has since morphed to include staunch nationalism, flirtation with Nazi-era slogans, opposition to Muslim immigrants, and criticism of Berlin’s military support of Ukraine.A ruling by Germany’s top court earlier this year greenlit continued domestic surveillance of the AfD and its youth wing and affirmed a designation by domestic intelligence of AfD as an extremist organization.While Germany’s mainstream parties reject building a coalition with the AfD outright, the increasingly fragmented political landscape may open the door to parliament just enough for Frau Wagenknect’s BSW party to enter government.The upstart party, formed by Ms. Wagenkneckt after her split with The Left earlier this year, is jockeying for second place with the Christian Democrats in Thuringia and is competitive in Brandenburg and Saxony.Ms. Wagenkneckt is a former East German communist. Her party has been described as culturally conservative and left-wing nationalist, and like AfD, maintains strong opposition to asylum seekers and favors deeper ties with Russia.Mr. Scholz sold his candidacy to the German electorate as the natural successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 16-year tenure, a so-called continuation candidate and a status-quo, business-as-usual politician.The wave of popularity Herr Scholz rode to the chancellery, however, has since soured, thanks in part to the chancellor’s enigmatic communication, stagnant economic growth, a constitutionally-mandated debt brake, and accusations of timidity toward Russia from within his coalition.Herr Scholz’s already sagging approval rating took a further hit last week, altering predictions more decidedly in the AfD and BSW’s favor. This comes at a particularly inopportune time for his center-left Social Democrats.A knife attack by a 26-year-old Syrian asylum seeker, Issa al Hasan, on Friday at Solingen, left three dead and eight wounded. Mr. al Hasan had declared on social media his allegiance to the Islamic State ahead of the stabbing spate.Alternative for Germany lawmakers quickly latched on to Mr. al Hasan’s country of origin after the attack and attributed the loss of life to the current ruling coalition’s social policies.The AfD’s top man in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, took to X in the aftermath, calling the violence the product of a “self-destructive social experiment” and asked voters for support to protect against “violence by foreigners.”In both Thuringia and Saxony, voters likely to cast a Social Democrat ballot hover at six percent — a single percentage point above the five percent minimum needed for a party to enter parliament.If polling holds, this would be the worst result for Herr Scholz’s Social Democrats in those states since the first free and open elections following German reunification in 1990.The party may — for the first time — fail to enter the Thuringian and Saxon parliaments in either part of a ruling coalition or an opposition faction.Irrespective of the results, the AfD is unlikely to enter coalition negotiations, but a regional breakthrough into government would be a significant, early success for BSW and points toward a more contentious and fractured political future. Finding common ground, though, between a party founded by a former member of the East German Communist Party and the center-right Christian Democrats may prove a tough row to hoe.

Trouble for Germany’s Scholz Is Portended in Three State Elections Set for Sunday

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