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Polling stations opened in Germany at 8 a.m. local time on Sunday and will close 10 hours later. Never had the outcome been so uncertain. In previous elections, when Angela Merkel was still in the running, the only question was: who will she reign with? But today, the question is: who will succeed him?
Things are heating up in the Kultur Brauerei, a gigantic building that served as a cultural center turned into a beer factory in former East Berlin. On the eve of the elections a noisy fanfare concert on the theme “hit against the right“(” hit against the right “) takes center stage in Das Kesselhaus, one of the buildings of the old brewery.
The organizing group, which bears the name “Bolschewistische Kurkapelle Schwartz-Rot”, is a brass band that produces music reminiscent of the avant-garde versions of Berthold Brecht Quart’s Opera. They are the last to perform and to arouse the enthusiasm of the public.
“I do not expect much change,” said Sacha Grohmann, the drummer of the collective, when asked about the elections. “People are not hungry for change. They are comfortable.”
Over a decade of Merkel’s rule has raised the standard of living for Germans, and in a way, says Grohman, that’s a shame. “There is the climate situation. We need the change,” he stresses.
But in the former East Germany there is even more discontent than in the west. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent privatization of many state-owned enterprises, many lost.
“After the fall of the wall, East Germany has become a political laboratory, an experimentation room for the extreme right,” Klaus Lederer, deputy mayor of Berlin, told RFI.
“But it has also become an experiment of radical neo-liberalization. And it has come true.” According to Lederer, the unrest and the uncertainty it caused has been “ignored by authorities and police”.
Combined with the feeling of being “third-rate Germans”, people in the East began to look at a party like the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) that promised a return to “law and order” , he said.
However, even if the AfD will win more than 25% in some districts of the former East, the numbers nationwide are falling, and the race will once again be between the big two, the Christian Democratic CDU of Merkel and Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD). .
Recent polls show that the Social Democrats are slightly ahead. The Greens ecologists, with candidate Annalena Baerbock, make their first round in the chancellery, and the polls place them several points from third place.
Caretaker
The Social Democrats were boosted by the relative popularity of Scholz after a long electoral crisis and by the tough campaigns of his rivals. Baerbock suffered from early blunders and Laschet, the governor of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, struggled to motivate his party’s traditional base.
About 60.4 million people in the nation of 83 million are eligible to elect the new Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, which will elect the next head of government.
No party should come close to an absolute majority. Polls show support for all below 30%.
Such a result could mean that many ruling coalitions are mathematically possible, and trigger weeks or months of bargaining to form a new government. Until she is in place, Merkel will remain in office on an interim basis.
(With PA)
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