The Guardian view on Germany’s disaffected east: a growing crisis for Olaf Scholz

In 2021, as Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SPD) unexpectedly triumphed in a knife-edge federal election, one of its most stellar results was achieved in the east German state of Brandenburg. In a regional contest anticipated to be a battle between the centre-right and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a promise to raise the minimum wage helped the SPD win a direct mandate in every constituency.
That seems much longer than three years ago. On Sunday, two high-stakes regional polls will take place in Germany’s east, one in Saxony and the other in Thuringia. Then, on 22 September, it will be Brandenburg’s turn. In each contest, the AfD has a good chance of winning, a feat it has never managed before in a state election. On issues such as migration, the politics of both the Thuringia and the Saxony branches of the AfD have been singled out as particularly extreme and anti-constitutional by German intelligence services.
Separately, a self-styled “left-conservative” party, led by a former East German communist, has emerged as a significant new disruptive force, eclipsing the more straightforwardly socialist Left party. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) is polling third in each state, after campaigning – like the AfD – for an end to arms support for Ukraine, abandoning net zero targets and slashing levels of immigration.
Post-reunification, for cultural and historical as well as economic reasons, the political dynamics of Germany’s poorer east have always been particular. Its five Länder have rarely been a happy hunting ground for Social Democrats, Greens or FDP liberals – the three parties making up Mr Scholz’s floundering “traffic-light” coalition. But the consolidation of the east as a political crucible for insular nationalism, and the most extreme versions of Germany’s far right, should set alarm bells ringing in Berlin at a critical moment.
Angry debate over immigration and asylum policy has been reignited throughout Germany, after a failed Syrian asylum seeker confessed to the fatal stabbing of three festivalgoers in the western town of Solingen. The killings have been seized on by the AfD’s lead candidate in Thuringia, Björn Höcke – who has previously written of the need for a “large-scale re-migration project” to return Germany to its ethnic roots. Forced repatriation, in plainer words.
Such opportunism was predictable. But there is a danger that unprecedented success for the AfD this weekend and the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht may presage a shift in the rest of the country. In the wake of the Solingen attack, the leader of the centre-right CDU, Friedrich Merz, called for the rejection of all asylum applications from Syria and Afghanistan. Mr Scholz is moving, at a slightly slower pace, in a similar direction. What were once far-right themes and talking points are influencing the mainstream, in the European Union’s most powerful and traditionally moderate member state.
In June’s European polls, the AfD finished second nationally, ahead of Mr Scholz’s party, which recorded its worst result in more than a century. A year out from the next federal election, the cordon sanitaire that has kept it out of power at national and state level still holds, although there have been local lapses. But as the political centre of gravity shifts rightwards in Germany, the impact of this weekend’s contests in the east may resonate not only in Berlin but in Brussels and other European capitals too.