AFP/Berlin
Germany’s fledgling anti-euro party celebrated election gains in two eastern states yesterday, in a show of strength that spells a growing threat for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
“We are the force that’s renewing the political landscape,” said a jubilant Bernd Lucke, leader of the eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD), which wants Europe’s biggest economy to scrap the euro and return to the Deutschmark currency.
“I’m happy about this enormous vote of confidence,” said the economics professor, adding that voters are turning away from mainstream parties that he said lack a clear message.
His nascent conservative party, which was only formed early last year, gained 10% in Thuringia state and 12% in Brandenburg, said exit polls by public broadcasters ARD and ZDF.
The strong results – far better than those of the long established Greens, who scored 5-6%, and the Free Democrats, who failed to get any seats – came two weeks after the AfD party also entered parliament in the eastern state of Saxony with almost 10%.
Analysts had predicted the AfD would draw much of the protest vote in the former East Germany, which still lags western states in wealth, jobs and wages 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell.
The poll results give a political toehold to the party, which only narrowly missed out on entering the national parliament in September last year and managed to win seven seats in European Parliament elections in May.
The AfD denies seeking hardline right-wing voters, but flirts with populist ideas on issues such as law and order, immigration and traditional social values.
Among its demands is a referendum that would seek to block plans to build a mosque in the eastern city of Dresden.
Merkel, worried about the AfD’s growing ballot box appeal, this week said that “we must address the problems that concern the people”, including “crime and rising numbers of asylum seekers”.
Analysts say that the AfD is seeking to occupy the political ground to the right of Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) while keeping its distance from the far-right fringe, like the openly xenophobic National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
Political scientist Werner Patzelt of Dresden Technical University said that it was too early to tell whether the AfD – now in its political “puberty” and benefiting from a string of victories in a tight electoral calendar – is here to stay.
But Patzelt pointed out that the AfD’s central theme – railing against eurozone bailouts and an emerging EU “super state” – is unlikely to go away soon and that such fears are mirrored in other European countries.
Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble had on Saturday dismissed the AfD as populists who offer simple slogans to fish for the votes of disgruntled citizens.
“Politicians who don’t care about what can actually be done but who only stoke unease, I just call them demagogues,” said Schaeuble. “You can’t shape the future with them.”
Another party that made gains in Thuringia was the far-left Linke party, which groups former eastern Communists and anti-capitalists from western states.
It scored about 28% in Thuringia – second only to the CDU’s roughly 35% – potentially giving it a shot at power in a three-party coalition government there for the first time since reunification.
The Linke’s top candidate in Thuringia, Bodo Ramelow, 58, had said he hopes to oust the CDU and join forces with the centre-left SPD and Greens.
It would be the first so-called “red-red-green” government in which the Linke would be the senior partner and would make a similar alliance thinkable at the national level one day.
The threat led Merkel to warn on the eve of elections that “Karl Marx would return” to the state government.
So far the SPD has rejected a national level tie-up with the Linke, whose policy positions include a basic salary for everybody, a ban on any German military missions abroad and the dissolution of Nato.
The SPD, meanwhile, easily cruised to victory in Brandenburg, the state that encircles Berlin, which has been a Social Democratic bastion for 24 years.