Democracy goes to extremes. Lessons from Brandenburg
Is democracy back in good odour now that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party scored a victory over the far-right ethnonationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the election in Brandenburg?
Yes and no.
The result was democratic in that the voters got what they wanted. A frazzled, if marginally victorious SPD, the Social Democrat party led by Mr Scholz. And a smirking AfD, conscious that its vote is up about six per cent from the election in Brandenburg five years ago.
In fact, this election was yet another sign of the SPD’s unpopularity. It is polling nationally at a mere 14 per cent. In Brandenburg itself, a state the SPD has ruled for decades, close to one in three voters cast their ballot for AfD. As Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-chair, has said, her party only lost due to tactical voting.
True.
Many Brandenburg voters said they voted for the status quo to ensure that the AfD would not gain power. Those voters’ views, as revealed in opinion polls sponsored by German public television, were less a vote for the SPD rather than a vote against the AfD.
No wonder the SPD, which has ruled Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin since German reunification in 1990, only notched up a narrow victory. It received just 31 per cent of the vote while the AfD placed second with 29 per cent.
In a sense then, the vote being cast for the mainstream in Europe is increasingly flipping from a positive mandate to that uncomfortable position of uber negativity: the protest vote.
The protest voter uses their ballot to vote against something rather than for a policy position, candidate, or political party. Not too long ago, the electorate would often punish the mainstream party in power by casting just enough protest votes for extreme policy options that politicians remained slightly rattled. Not too long ago, the constant battle for voters’ hearts and minds remained firmly within the political centre-ground, by express permission of the electorate, so long as the mainstream stayed innovative and in tune with those it claimed to represent.
No longer.
Brandenburg shows that the far right is making the political weather in Europe.
