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Katharina Schulze of the Green Party, which has resumed its momentum, reacts during the national elections in Munich on Sunday in Munich. (Clemens Bilan / EPA-EFE)
On Sunday, about 9.5 million voters in southern Germany went to the polls to elect the parliament of Bavaria. The far-right alternative for Germany (AfD) and the liberal Greens have had good nights – but the traditionally dominant forces in German politics, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, have had nights to forget.
The result then sparked a host of questions about Bavarian, German and wider European politics.
A peculiarity of the German policy implied that the center-right of the Chancellor Angela Merkel The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) did not appear on the ballot of Bavaria. Germany is made up of 16 states and the CDU is competing in 15 of them. In Bavaria, the 16th In the previous state, the CDU leaves the field open to candidates from its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU). The CDU and CSU form the national government of Berlin alongside the left-wing social-democratic SPD.
CSU has always dominated Bavarian post-war politics. Since 1945, the party has regularly won the majority of seats in Parliament, which is not a trivial matter in a multiparty democracy. This time, the CSU behaved very badly with 37.2% of the vote (see full results here), against 47.7% in the previous regional elections of 2013.
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The Social Democratic Party (SPD), the left-wing party in the center, did the same thing, with 9.7% of the vote, after winning 20.6% of the vote in 2013. The biggest winners were two of the smallest gone; the far right alternative for Germany (AfD) as well as a resurgent green party. The AfD then entered the Bavarian Parliament for the first time with 10.2% of the vote, while the Greens went from 8.6% in 2013 to 17.5% in 2018.
Is German politics changing?
These results could suggest that Bavarian politics, and by extension German politics, is changing. Here are two good reasons to be cautious before concluding. Tectonic plates can move in Germany, but that does not mean that a large-scale political earthquake is imminent.
Many academic studies examine what determines the choice of voters in regional elections. We know that three things usually happen in these competitions: the participation rate is lower than in national elections, the parties that make up the national government tend to behave badly in regional polls, and small parties tend to be very good. to behave.
In this week's Bavarian vote, two of these assumptions are based on significant empirical weight. The two national government parties (CSU and SPD) running in this election had catastrophic performances. That's right, no matter how you measure expectations (see here for a way to quantify these expectations).
If the politicians of the CSU and the SPD knew their electoral history, they knew that their performance would be mediocre. They will also know that the next German elections should not take place before 2021, they have time to regroup and rebound. Indeed, this is exactly what happens normally after an election like this.
What about the theory that small parties tend to behave well in regional elections? Charlie Jeffery and I reported in Monkey Cage that in the early years of a unified German policy, smaller parties could regularly vote (at least) twice what they normally expected at the time. National elections in a given state.
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In Bavaria, this theory played on steroids. AFD did not participate in the competition in 2013 and yet voted double-digit – and the Greens doubled their number of votes. Yes, it was catchy on election night, but historically not as far from what we've seen before.
There is another continuity to note here
The result seems even less dramatic if we see it through the lens of party blockages. Parties in Germany must work together to form national governments. This is the case, no party can ever do enough to form a government on its own. Parties come together to create these coalitions once the election results are achieved.
There are essentially two of these informal "blocks" of parties. The Greens, the SPD and the Socialist Left Party face each other against the CDU, the CSU and the FDP on the right. Since the AfD is to the right of all these parties, it is also considered to be part of the right-wing bloc. This is the case even if it stays beyond the coalition. In the case of Bavaria, the regionalist Free Voters (FW) also broadens the center-right spectrum.
During the elections in Bavaria, the share of the votes of the left parties increased from 31.3% in 2013 to 30.4% in 2018. Not a huge change. The right-center-right bloc also queried similar figures to the CSU and FW (59% in 2018 vs. 57.5%) in 2013. These figures are remarkably stable.
We must be wary of aggregated data, but the stability of the blocks nevertheless deserves to be underlined. The fact that a new party pushes the right block to the right is also remarkable, but not extraordinary – in a broader European context.
Did CSU set the right tone?
Other conservative parties in Europe could focus on another point. CSU's strategy has failed – even though it has been campaigning on the number of people to the right of the European political spectrum who have argued that a conservative party should do the same. He adopted, for example, a hard line on the issues of immigration and asylum and was sometimes of a tone almost misleading. That's what was done to try to neutralize the AfD, but trying to get around the far right by being more and more extreme-right did not work.
European politicians could also study what the Bavarian Greens have just done. The success of the Greens in Bavaria is commensurate with its performance in national opinion polls. Faced with the implosion of the Social Democrats, the Greens have the opportunity to strengthen their position as a leading force of the center-left. It remains to be seen if this remains one of the outstanding issues raised by the elections in Bavaria.
Dan Hough is a professor of politics at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. He tweets to @thedanhough.
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