German Elections Exemplify De-Alignment That Forces Needed Changes On The Center-Left
As expected, Angela Merkel won a fourth term as German Chancellor in elections held yesterday. While Merkel’s re-election was no surprise, the results for the far-right nationalist party AfD were. AfD secured over 13% of the vote, becoming the third largest bloc in the Bundestag with 94 seats behind the two major parties, the CDU/CSU bloc and the SPD.
Just like UKIP and, to some degree, France’s National Front, electoral success has exposed the fissures in the AfD as its co-leader, Frauke Petry, resigned from the party to serve an independent PM. Her resignation signaled the failure of her efforts to moderate the party in an attempt to actually make it capable of eventually joining a ruling coalition.
More importantly, AfD’s success reflects the failure of the CDU/CSU/SPD “grand coalition”. AfD was able to not only mobilize traditional non-voters, adding around 1.2 million, but also managed to take away over 1 million votes from the CDU/CSU and around half a million from the SPD. In many ways, AfD’s results were probably more of a repudiation of the grand coalition than support for the far-right, xenophobic policies the party espouses. As in the US and, to some degree, the UK, the surge in support for the AfD was located in areas of Germany, especially in the former East Germany, where immigration has been lowest.
The repudiation of a centrist coalition and the rise of right-wing nationalism is something that we have seen across the West in recent elections. AfD, UKIP, National Front, and Trumpism all are an apparent reaction to the failures of the centrist parties on the right and especially on the left to effectively deal with the fallout of the financial crisis and the Great Recession. In the US, UK, France, now Germany, and even in Spain, the traditional ruling parties on the left and the right joined together in protecting the financial industry and then imposing crippling austerity, ensuring that recovery from the financial crisis would be slower and more painful than necessary.
In the UK, Ed Milliband’s inability and apparent unwillingness in the 2015 election to defend the economic decisions of the prior Labour government headed by Gordon Brown cost the Labour party dearly. For many in that election, Labour provided no real alternative to the Tory program, except on the margins. Similarly, Hollande’s failure to live up to his election promises in taking on European and German austerity essentially destroyed the Socialist Party in France. Even in Spain, the Socialist Party’s acceptance of austerity has led to losing its dominance of the left to Podemos. And in the US, the Democratic Party’s infatuation with neoliberalism and, under the constraints of the Republican-dominated Congress, its turn to austerity and inability to adequately facilitate the economic recovery arguably led to Donald Trump’s election.
The consequence of the rise of these far-right nationalist parties has been, ironically, a return to progressive solutions by the parties on the center left. Jeremy Corbyn and the success of Labour in the last election illustrates this quite clearly. Here in the US, Clinton’s loss has allowed the progressive wing of the Democratic party to gain even more influence. As noted earlier, Spain has seen the rise of Podemos, challenging the Socialists for primacy on the left. And, now, in Germany, the SPD is refusing to enter into another grand coalition and is gearing up to be a true opposition party on the left. It is disappointing that it is taking this path at least partly or even primarily to ensure that AfD did not become the strongest opposition party. But it is a necessary step.
As Cas Mudde writes, these elections reflect more of a de-alignment rather than a re-alignment in German politics. I think this applies to the other Western democracies where right-wing nationalism has risen. For the most part, these right-wing nationalist parties primarily find voters among the politically inactive and/or the center right. This note only weakens the center-right but drives those parties further to the right in order to fend off the populist challenge. On the flip side, this de-alignment not only forces the traditional center-left parties to finally distinguish themselves distinctively from the policies of the center right but also gives the progressives within those parties and countries more power and influence.
