Listen to the audio version of the article
They were the European elections with the highest turnout since the reunification of the two Germanys, with almost 65% of the almost 65 million Germans entitled to vote going to the polls. And for the first time the minimum age was 16. But this electoral round will go down in history for more, for the defeat of the two main parties of the federal government and for the victory of the two parties of the far right and far left.
The SPD Social Democrats, the strongest party in the ruling traffic light coalition, recorded the worst vote in their history, 13.9%, going below the historic low of 15.8% in the 2019 European elections. The Greens, the second most important party in the federal government, suffered the worst decline of all and fell from 8.6% to 11.9%: the young and very young people themselves fled from green issues.
AfD second party, BSW well above quorum, Liberals doing well
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right party that has never entered a federal or regional government until now, has become the second party in Germany and the first in East Germany, achieving a record result of 15.9% despite the scandals that have overwhelmed its leading candidates for the European elections on the eve of the vote.
The other party with extreme positions, but on the left, is Alleanza Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW). Founded last January by breaking away from Die Linke, this new party led by the charismatic leader Sahra Wagenknecht debuted in these elections with 6.2%, going well beyond the threshold of 5% in the German Parliament. The Liberals, the governing party of the traffic light coalition with the smallest percentage but with the key Ministry of Finance, were also satisfied with the vote: the FDP managed to stay above 5%, which was not at all a given in the forecasts, but recording 5.2% still suffered a drop of 0.2% compared to the 2019 elections.
Finally, despite appearances as the largest party in Germany, things did not go very well for the centre-right Union. CDU-CSU rose slightly to 30% compared to 28.9% in the European elections in 2019 (+1.1% all coming from the CDU). This is a modest result because it is not enough to dominate the political scene and at the moment it would not be enough to form a new Grand Coalition government with the Social Democrats like in Angela Merkel’s time.
