Have we learned nothing?
The imprint of a swastika in the German flag crossed out the front page of the magazine in mid-May Spiegel, frightened to see the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party climb in the polls in this most populous country in the European Union, which will send the largest delegation of deputies to Parliament (96 out of 720).
Fears confirmed by the estimates at the end of the polls: certainly, the conservatives of the CDU-CSU come in first (29.5%, compared to 28.9% in 2019).
But the breakthrough of the AfD, placed second with 16.5% (+ 5.5 points), eclipses everything. The xenophobic party, however, experienced a very stormy end to the campaign. Accused of stirring up hatred in his speeches, he was singled out after an unprecedented number of attacks against politicians, including the social-democrat MEP Mattias Ecke, the former mayor of Berlin Franziska Giffey but also three elected officials AfD regional…
The ruling coalition sanctioned
The messy scandals will not have got the better of the mobilization for the extreme right either. What does it matter if the head of the AfD list, outgoing MEP Maximilian Krah, has been banned from meetings since mid-May by his own party, after his comments on the SS, not all criminals
.
What does it matter if several elected officials and a party assistant were implicated in an investigation into Chinese and Russian interference in the European Parliament.
What does it matter if the AfD has become inaccessible in the eyes of its allies, the French RN and the Italian League of Matteo Salvini, who excluded it from their nationalist group Identity and Democracy (ID) in the European Parliament…
By moving far to the right, the Germans are also sanctioning their ruling coalition: the social democratic party (SPD) of Chancellor Olaf Scholz declines to 14% (-1.8 points). The liberal FDP remains stable at 5%. But the Grünen ecologists, the big surprise of 2019 with a record score (20.5%), dropped to 12%.
