The AfD bandwagon rolls on - what are the implications?

Germany's anti-euro AfD party has hit a rich vein of electoral form building on its success in Saxony two weeks ago (where it scored 9.7% and won its first seats in one of Germany's 16 regional parliaments) to win 12.2% in Brandenburg and 10.6% in Thuringia; a considerable improvement on pre-election polls.

As the graphic below shows, AfD won votes across the political spectrum, In net terms, its success came at the expense of the left - Die Linke in Brandenburg and the SPD in Thuringia - although in gross terms it also won a lot of votes from the CDU and FDP.

Where did the AfD's votes come from in Brandenburg and Thuringia?

This reflects the nature of the AfD campaign in these areas which combined an explicit pitch to Die Linke voters emphasising Ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany), AfD's opposition to TTIP and to the sanctions on Russia with more traditional 'small c' conservative messages on crime and immigration (for example, AfD wants to re-impose border checks). On the whole, the question of Europe and the euro barely featured.

While AfD's recent successes should not be over-interpreted, inflated as they are by higher rates of disaffected voters in East Germany and low turnouts, it does nonetheless pose difficult questions for the established parties. This is particularly true for the CDU/CSU for whom, as we've noted, AfD is too big to ignore, yet too controversial to team up with. In the longer term however this might change if it becomes evident that the AfD is the only alternative to permanent 'grand coalitions' at the regional and federal level, a scenario which would arguably strengthen AfD even more.

We expect that this will be hot debate within the CDU in the coming months and years. Meanwhile, the AfD itself faces a big test; 12 months on from narrowly missed out on winning Bundestag seats the party has performed well in European and regional elections, however, with next year's Hamburg regional elections the only significant entry in the electoral calendar over the next year and a half, can the party sustain its recent momentum? If it stalls, could we see deeper splits between the economic liberals and protectionists/social conservatives who make up the party's uneasy internal coalition?

The CDU's 'AfD problem': too big to ignore, too controversial to team up with

Yesterday’s regional elections in Saxony saw Germany's anti-euro Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) score an impressive 9.7%  netting the party its first ever seats in one of Germany’s regional parliaments. The lead candidate of the Green party, Antje Hermenau, described the AfD result as an “earthquake” while AfD leader Bernd Lucke celebrated that they “finally arrived on the German party landscape.”

It is now up to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party to find a new coalition partner after Saxony's FDP followed the national party in losing all its seats. The CDU's lead candidate and current Prime Minister of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, categorically excluded a potential coalition with the AfD describing it as a protest party that due to its inner turmoil was completely unfit to govern. He only waited until after the election result was announced to make this statement however, following a debate within the CDU which continues.

Commenting on the prospects for a CDU-AfD coalition, Bild columnist Bela Anda writes that if it were to enter into a coalition with the AfD,

“The CDU would saw off the branch on which it itself is sitting." 

A CDU-SPD grand coalition is therefore the most likely option although a CDU-Green coalition could also be on the cards.

So is the AfD 'Gekommen um zu bleiben' (here to stay)?

This is not only the title of a famous German pop song but now the question everyone is asking themselves. Regional elections in Thüringen and Brandenburg are coming up in two weeks and the AfD has a good chance of enter both regional parliaments. However, the party's objective remains winning Bundestag seats in 2017 having narrowly missed the 5% threshold in 2013. There will be another eleven regional elections before 2017 and the challenge for the party will be to keep the momentum going. The AfD leadership will no doubt remember the fate of the Pirate party in 2011 - polled at a spectacular 13% before plummeting into virtual non-existence.

In Saxony a large share of AfD vote came from ‘Sonstige’ (other parties) and ‘Nichtwähler’ (non-voters) which is typical for protest parties. But at the same time there is a considerable spread across most mainstream parties with the largest share coming from the CDU (34,000 votes).

This would be a particular headache for Angela Merkel’s party. The worst case scenario for Merkel is that the AfD becomes to the CDU what Die Linke is to the SPD - and indeed, some would say, UKIP to the Tories in Britain: too big to ignore, too controversial to team up with. This headache will become particularly severe if the liberal FDP's decline is irreversible, dooming the CDU to always have to look to the SDP (or the Greens), in turn making left-right coalitions more or less a permanent feature of German politics.

Belated Ascension Day for Juncker?

Since Tuesday's European Council, at which Angela Merkel pointedly played down Jean-Claude Juncker's prospects of becoming the next European Commission President, she has come under a phenomenal amount of pressure domestically from a wide ranging coalition spanning senior members of her own party, her coalition partner the SPD, the opposition Green party, Germany's most popular tabloid Bild Zeitung and Jürgen Habermas.

This pressure was most likely responsible for her change of tone earlier this afternoon when she said that:

"I am conducting all the discussions in the spirit that Jean-Claude Juncker should be the President of the European Commission."

Even if this is not tantamount to saying "Juncker will be the next Commission President", it is still a clear departure from her position on Tuesday when she said that:

“The agenda [of the next European Commission] can be handled by [Juncker], but also by many others...At the end, there will be a fairly broad tableau of names on the table.”

The SPD has been quick to respond, with the party's General Secretary Yasmin Fahimi claiming that:

"It is good that the public pressure on Merkel forced her to correct her stance. Anything else would have been cheating the voters."

So is it a done deal? No - a lot can still happen before the next Commission President is announced; despite the lofty talk about 'EU democracy', Juncker's eventual ascension or otherwise will still come down to cynical horse-trading between member states - if there is a wider national advantage (such as securing a key Commission portfolio) to be had by supporting an alternative candidate, some member states may jump at the chance. 

However, it cannot be denied that Juncker's prospects look healthier than they did this morning, leaving Cameron in a vulnerable position. We do not know exactly how many other member states share his reservations about Juncker but the risk is that some could now peel away, thereby massively reducing the chances of forming a blocking minority. 

The question for the UK is now whether to accept the damage that a Juncker led Commission would entail and seek other policy and personnel concessions or to invest significant political capital in blocking his accession. Given how big this issue has become both in of itself but also as a proxy for the battle of visions in Europe, Cameron must get something very substantial.

Anything short of the single market portfolio for the next UK Commissioner probably wouldn't cut it. 

What does Alternative für Deutschland really stand for? Its getting hard to tell

Beatrix says change direction - but where to?

When the anti-euro Alternative für Deutschland was first founded, it was derided as a fringe party for professors obsessed with ordoliberalism that would struggle to make a lasting impact on the German political scene.

However, the party got within 0.3% of the vote of winning seats in the Bundestag in September and is polling at around 6%-7% ahead of the European elections, meaning it looks certain to win seats in Brussels/Strasbourg. Yet the party's relatively strong showing in the polls masks serious internal divides along personnel and policy lines.

At the start of the year, it was being reported that some founding members were leaving in disillusionment in the belief that the party was abandoning its liberal roots and embarking on a sharply 'rightward' trajectory, which was manifested by the embracing of traditional Christian moral values and taking a tough line on immigration - AfD were notably the only mainstream German party to praise the results of the Swiss referendum on curbing free movement.

Initially, it seemed that this shift to the 'right' was limited to social policy, with AfD still maintaining its liberalism on economic policy; Hans-Olaf Henkel - the former head of the Federation of German Industries - described it as "Germany's last liberal party". However, this also seems to have been consigned to the past following the party's convention over the weekend at which it voted on its manifesto for the European elections.

Crucially, the party's grassroots voted to reject the EU-US free trade deal (TTIP) currently under negotiation despite strong support from the leadership including party leader Bernd Lucke, who argued that it was a "positive, constructive objective which is very much in Germany's interest". Beatrix von Storch (pictured), an MEP candidate and high profile AfD activist - who for many epitomises the party's recent lurch towards conservatism - argued that the agreement "is not fair and will burden our country".

Interestingly, when it came to the recent events in the Crimea, the party's deputy federal spokesperson criticised the independence referendum but also called for greater "understanding" for Moscow and described the interim Ukrainian government as "not democratically legitimate". A motion was passed (to thundering applause according to FAZ) rejecting German taxpayer assistance for Ukraine and economic sanctions on Russia.

Such sentiments - scepticism of free trade deals (or 'directed trade' as libertarians would say) and emphasises on isolationism in world affairs, puts the AfD closer to either the American "Old Right" (which Europeans tend not to even remotely understand) or the European Socialist Left.

So what does all this mean? Well it seems that AfD are at risk of becoming a catch-all populist party with strongly ideologically contradictory factions rather than one which can be easily placed on the traditional 'left/right' axis. This applies to a number of other European parties which combine elements of both including the National Front, PVV, the (True) Finns party and UKIP (although UKIP economic policy is more liberal than the others'). It also shows that those Tories keen for AfD to join the ECR group in the European Parliament may wish to pause for thought.

To some extent this is not surprising given that even in its early stages the party paradoxically drew disproportionate support from former FDP and Die Linke voters. We also noted after the elections that the party had done particularly well in Eastern Germany, which tends to vote more heavily for left-wing parties than West Germany. In the East, AfD has also struggled to contain creeping take-over attempts by more nationalist elements.

The question for the party is where does it go from here: does it establish itself as a permanent protest party borrowing ideas and policies from the political smorgasbord as it sees fit  - there is clearly a gap in the market - or does it try to remain a genuine economically liberal party angling for a spot in the mainstream?