Episode 112: Eastern State Elections and Their Implications for National Politics
Christian Schweiger
University of Cooperative Education Saxony
Dr. Christian Schweiger is Visiting Professor at the University of Cooperative Education Saxony in Germany. Previously he was employed at TU Chemnitz, Durham University, and Trinity College Dublin. His research concentrates on Comparative European Politics and Comparative European Political Economy. His most recent publications include “Governance under the Covid-19 Pandemic: Comparative perspectives on Germany and Hungary" in Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft and “The German Economic Model: from Germany's Social Market Economy to Neoliberalism?” in Oxford Handbook of German Politics (ed. Klaus Larres, Holger Moroff, and Ruth Wittlinger).
Eric Langenbacher
Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Dr. Eric Langenbacher is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Society, Culture & Politics Program at AICGS.
Dr. Langenbacher studied in Canada before completing his PhD in Georgetown University’s Government Department in 2002. His research interests include collective memory, political culture, and electoral politics in Germany and Europe. Recent publications include the edited volumes Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election (2019), The Merkel Republic: The 2013 Bundestag Election and its Consequences (2015), Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe (co-edited with Ruth Wittlinger and Bill Niven, 2013), Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations (co-edited with Yossi Shain, 2010), and From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic: Germany at the Twentieth Anniversary of Unification (co-edited with Jeffrey J. Anderson, 2010). With David Conradt, he is also the author of The German Polity, 10th and 11th edition (2013, 2017).
Dr. Langenbacher remains affiliated with Georgetown University as Teaching Professor and Director of the Honors Program in the Department of Government. He has also taught at George Washington University, Washington College, The University of Navarre, and the Universidad Nacional de General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has given talks across the world. He was selected Faculty Member of the Year by the School of Foreign Service in 2009 and was awarded a Fulbright grant in 1999-2000 and the Hopper Memorial Fellowship at Georgetown in 2000-2001. Since 2005, he has also been Managing Editor of German Politics and Society, which is housed in Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies. Dr. Langenbacher has also planned and run dozens of short programs for groups from abroad, as well as for the U.S. Departments of State and Defense on a variety of topics pertaining to American and comparative politics, business, culture, and public policy.
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Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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In state elections in Thuringia and Saxony, the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged to first and second place, respectively, with over 30 percent of the vote in both states. The left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)—only in existence since January—came in third in both states, receiving more votes than any party in the current national governing coalition. This episode of The Zeitgeistexamines what motivated voters to leave mainstream parties for the political extremes, what dynamics are at play as the parties must now try to find coalition governments, and how the results could impact national policies now and the upcoming federal elections in 2025.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Eric Langenbacher, AGI Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Christian Schweiger, Visiting Professor, University of Cooperative Education Saxony
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
Well, I want to welcome all of our listeners to the first visit after the summer break with the Zeitgeist, and I’m glad to have with me today my colleague Dr. Eric Langenbacher, who is the director of our Society, Culture & Politics Program. Hello, Eric.
Eric Langenbacher
Hello, Jeff.
Jeff Rathke
It is the day after Labor Day, September 3rd, as we are talking, and the biggest thing in recent days has been elections in two of eastern Germany’s states, Saxony and Thuringia. We’ve got a really well-informed guest who can give us some perspective on this today. And what we’ve seen is a bit of an earthquake in German politics, one that perhaps people saw coming, dramatic gains by extreme parties in the two state elections. To understand what this means, how it affects the national level, and what we can expect in the future, I’m going to hand it over to you to introduce our guest and get us started.
Eric Langenbacher
Thanks, Jeff. I’m really pleased to introduce our third partner in this conversation, Dr. Christian Schweiger, who is a visiting professor at the University of Cooperative Education, Saxony. Previously, he taught at TU Chemnitz, Durham University, and Trinity College Dublin. His research concentrates on comparative European politics and comparative European political economy, and his most recent publications include “Governance under the Covid-19 Pandemic: Comparative perspectives on Germany and Hungary” as well as “The German Economic Model: from Germany’s Social Market Economy to Neoliberalism?” which was in the Oxford Handbook of German Politics. Welcome, Christian.
Jeff Rathke
And Christian, where are you joining us from today?
Christian Schweiger
From home, actually, from Chemnitz, where we’ve got obviously the big Karl Marx head in the city center.
Jeff Rathke
So you are joining us from Saxony, which is particularly appropriate. Eric, back to you.
Christian Schweiger
Exactly
Eric Langenbacher
All right. Well, we have much to discuss, but I thought I would start with a little overview of what actually happened on Sunday in Saxony and Thuringia. The big takeaways are that the right-wing populist AfD, the Alternative for Germany, did very well in both states, but also a new political grouping, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), also did very well. In Saxony, the AfD got 30.6 percent of the vote, which was up 3.1 percent from the last election, whereas in Thuringia, it got 32.8 percent of the vote, which was a nearly 10 percent increase from the last election. But this Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which is the left-populist alliance built around a former Left Party leader, got 11.8 percent in Saxony and got 15.8 percent in Thuringia.
Of course, the parties that are in the national coalition—the so-called Traffic Light Coalition—did really poorly. The SPD, the Social Democrats, got 7.3 percent in Saxony, although that was only a decline of .4 percent, so it wasn’t that different from the last election. And in Thuringia they got 6.1 percent of the vote, which was down over 2 percent. The Greens did really poorly at 5.1 percent in Saxony, nearly a 4 percent decline. And they got 3.2 percent in Thuringia, which means that they’re not going to be in the next Parliament. The FDP (Free Democrats) won’t have seats in either Parliament. They got only 1.1 percent in Thuringia, so a really bad day for the national governing parties.
The CDU (Christian Democratic Union) had an okay day, which is something I think we need to talk about a little bit more. They came in first in Saxony, which a lot of people were very happy for, at 31.9 percent, only a decline of .2 percent from the last time. And they came in second in Thuringia with 23.6 percent of the vote, which was actually up nearly 2 percent. Still, I don’t think that this was a great result for the main opposition party at the national level. So, with that on the table, I’ll hand it over to Christian for some initial thoughts, particularly how this will impact the national level.
Christian Schweiger
Well, to start off with, I would say for most outside spectators of what has been going on, this is quite a surprising result. They will say, “well, how can this happen that the governing parties on the federal level lose? I mean, not dramatically, but they obviously lost support, and how can a completely new party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht around a former figurehead of the of the Linke (Left Party), emerge from zero to double digits, and how can the relatively extremist right-wing AfD come out first in Thuringia and just about second in Saxony?” Well, we have to obviously talk about what’s been going on here, and I think the story is—and most people who look closer know this—there has been an increasing drift between east and west in Germany in recent years. And the AfD has surprisingly—although it actually doesn’t offer much in terms of concrete policies, if you look at education and social policy—has managed to somehow, as a party that is mainly dominated by western elites, capture this mood and convince people that they should vote for, basically, if I can use the word that David Cameron talked about when he spoke about the the risk of Brexit, “the leap in the dark,” you know, a black box that nobody actually knows about. In a way the BSW is a similar case. So, we have to ask ourselves what other reasons there are for this, and I’m sure we can talk about this in greater detail.
On the overall level, the national level, well, this has obviously rattled the current coalition, the traffic light (the Ampel coalition), consisting of the SPD, Greens, and FDP. I would expect that they will have more internal infighting. They will, each of them, will try to raise their profile to try to show that they’re the strongest party in the government, but generally I think they will cling to each other like three rats that are on a sinking ship and that are trying to avoid disaster, and by clinging to one another, they think they might be able to do so. Because by leaving the coalition, the FDP would commit suicide. They are almost in oblivion in many of the regions now; they have almost not pulled anything. For the SPD and the Greens, leaving this coalition would actually mean that they admit that they failed in government. So, I think they will cling to trying to hold on to this coalition as long as possible. At the same time, of course, this election has given a sort of boost to the confidence of the CDU and the Bavarian CSU (Christian Social Union), because they are now convinced that they can win the next election, and with the prospect of the BSW particularly polling equally strongly, when they first run on the federal level in the autumn next year, they obviously have more coalition options. They’re no longer just depending on a potential new grand coalition with the SPD or some difficult Jamaica (coalition between the CDU, Greens, and FDP) arrangement or some sort of minority government, but they could actually use the BSW as a potential partner. So these are my initial thoughts on what’s been going on. But I’m sure we can talk in more detail about what the effects will be and what the reasons for this development are.
Jeff Rathke
I think that’s terrific. Thanks for the introduction, Eric and Christian. And I think we’ll come back to some of the national-level issues and in particular the attempt that Sahra Wagenknecht made in advance of the election to connect her demands for a change in the federal government’s Ukraine policy with any kind of cooperation. So we’ll come back to that, I’m sure.
It is really striking to see in both of these states the parties of the Olaf Scholz government getting 13 percent total or 10 percent in the case of Thuringia. The main question that starts off with me, when we look at each of these states, are they going to be able to form a government in either Saxony or Thuringia, in your view? There are significant challenges there because, as you mentioned, Eric, in Saxony, the Christian Democrats finished in first place, but there are existing party decisions at the national level that say the CDU will not work with the AfD—understandable—and that they will not work with the Left Party, which still remains somewhat strong, especially in Thuringia. But the CDU has not made such a determination about the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. So, you have this sort of dissonance that by all measures, the Sahra Wagenknecht party is more extreme than Die Linke, but the CDU hasn’t ruled that out. So how do you see these things shaking out in the Saxony and Thuringia cases?
Eric Langenbacher
Just to pop in for one second to talk about the coalitions. Really, really interesting. In Thuringia, for instance, there’s no majority that’s possible without the AfD, so there will likely be a minority government. So that’s something interesting, which means that the CDU is going to have to, at least informally, cooperate with the Left Party, which of course is the incumbent, or the leading party in the incumbent government. And in Saxony, there’s just two possible coalitions, both of which have to include the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. So really quite complicated and fascinating possibilities here.
Jeff Rathke
Hang on a second though, because in Thuringia you could have- if you had all of the non-AfD parties in a coalition then, they would have a majority, right?
Eric Langenbacher
Oh, sorry, that was premised on the fact that the CDU says they’re not going to formally work with the Left Party.
Jeff Rathke
Ah, right. OK, got it. Yeah, and that’s an important factor. Go ahead, Christian.
Christian Schweiger
Yeah, just to go straight to that point, the point Jeff raised, I mean, can they form governments in both regions, in both of the Länder. Starting with Thuringia, you’ve just mentioned it, the CDU has, at least up until now, categorically ruled out to govern with the part of the left, Die Linke. Friedrich Merz, the CDU party leader on the national level, has again reiterated yesterday that this is actually where the CDU stands. So, the question is, can they form this coalition you’ve just mentioned, Jeff? An all-party coalition against the AfD? This is the one big question. Can they work with Die Linke? And at the same time, could they include the BSW and Die Linke in a government? I think that’s going to be the crucial issue, because the BSW is actually a sort of split party from the Linke. There’s many former Linke activists in the BSW. They will really struggle to work with one another. We’ve just seen yesterday, senior people from the Linke attacking the BSW fiercely, accusing them of having made a right-wing populist agenda, particularly around migration, popular for the voters, moving the AfD’s topics into the mainstream. So, that’s where I see the main hurdles.
In Saxony, I think the crucial issue will be the BSW itself. There won’t be a problem to have another cooperation between the CDU and the SPD, but they need the BSW for a majority, and the BSW has now a fundamental question to ask itself: Are we better off as a completely new party entering such a coalition, doing what we actually promised during the election campaign to change the policy agenda in a way that people have never seen before, which means particularly to change the school system in Saxony, which has been failing dramatically? We’re talking here about many students from primary school all the way up to the grammar school not receiving lessons week by week in core subjects such as English, German, math, physics, and other important areas. Can they change migration policy on the regional level? You probably know that the still-Prime Minister of Saxony Michael Kretschmer (CDU) has talked about something like a Saxony regional border force to contain migration, similar to what Bavaria already has. Can they convince the SPD that is normally not very keen on doing these things to do this?
And then the crucial issue already mentioned, I think that’s the main problematic issue, Sahra Wagenknecht used these regional elections as a sort of tool for a national issue, which is support for Ukraine, a more conciliatory approach toward Russia, and she has demanded that the regional coalitions where the BSW participates—if they do participate—clearly state in their government agenda that they will oppose the stationing of U.S. missiles on German soil, the same questions we’ve had in the 1980s. And I think that’s going to be a very difficult issue, particularly if you include parties like the SPD that is obviously on the federal level clearly advocating fears against Russia, supporting Ukraine, and boosting German defense. So I think that this is where I see these main points. And the other thing is, of course, the BSW could decide that they might be better off as a new party to start off in opposition, to develop an alternative agenda, and to let the others go ahead. I think minority governments in both regions are not out of the question, although we usually don’t have them in Germany. I think that might be the only option. Otherwise, the CDU will have to say, “we’ll have to start talking to the AfD if we don’t want another round of elections.”
Jeff Rathke
And that’s of course another possibility. In each state you could have new elections, if it is impossible to form a government. So, would you consider new elections likely in one or both cases, Christian?
Christian Schweiger
Very unlikely. I think new elections would only happen really if all options have been ruled out. For example, if the coalition talks between the parties we’ve mentioned fail and then the option of talking to the AfD is really not something that the CDU could ever consider, even under these circumstances. Because a new election will most likely mean that AfD support will be boosted further. Many people who have been voting for the other parties might be fed up, might stay at home, but I would expect the AfD supporters to say, “this is our chance to boost the AfD even further and to push it ahead to the first place in Saxony, and now we have a right to govern and to even decide who is the Prime Minister, and in this case an AfD candidate.”
Jeff Rathke
And of course, through a confluence of circumstances this fall, there will be one more state election in Germany and that will be in another eastern German state, the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds the city of Berlin. And they have an election on September 22nd, so just in two weeks, and the AfD currently is in first place in the public opinion polls there. So, we won’t dive into Brandenburg necessarily today, but there is another one of these aftershocks, which we could see coming at us.
Christian Schweiger
Well, if we see a disaster there for the FDP or maybe a very bad showing for the SPD, I think there could actually be an early end to the Ampel coalition, but you never know.
Eric Langenbacher
I’d like to delve into for a moment why so many people in eastern Germany voted for the AfD and for the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. When I was looking at what the number one issues were, migration, especially in Saxony, was number one, but then other issues—you mentioned education. But I think one of the reasons that classes aren’t being offered is because of a pretty acute teacher shortage. So, there’s that. There’s also the shortage of skilled workers in both states. Health care is kind of a problem. And then of course there’s Ukraine and other things. So, one of the things that I’ve grappled with trying to understand voter behavior in these eastern states is that a lot of their concerns kind of contradict each other. I mean, how are you going to be able to address the shortage of skilled workers or the shortage of teachers without more migration? Yet migration is the number one issue that concerns people there. So, Christian, can you maybe help us walk through why people are turning to the AfD and the BSW and have the concerns that they have?
Christian Schweiger
Well, if you look at it from a very superficial level, then you can say it’s actually rational, because people are fed up, simply. People are fed up with a lot of things you’ve mentioned. And they turn toward the party that simply says, “let’s do things differently. Let’s simply change things and let’s particularly show those who are in government the red card and show them how angry we are.” We see this all across the world with populist parties. This is how they win elections.
In the case of eastern Germany—and I’m from the west and I’ve only just started to understand how they feel. This is a longer story. This is a story which starts with the aftermath of unification, where many of the people who are now quite old have witnessed a period where they’ve been promised “blooming landscapes,” where they’ve been told, “you won’t lose your jobs, everything will get better.” And for many of them, what they actually achieved in life, their work biography, was simply disappearing overnight. When the jobs were eradicated through the economic reforms that were taking place with the Treuhand and so on. Then you’ve had a lot of western elites coming to the east, filling up positions from universities, all across to the state bureaucracy, schools, hospitals, wherever you look. So there’s a feeling of being second-class citizens and not being listened to. And this feeling of not being listened to is something the AfD has picked up again and again. Again, interestingly, as a party—if you look at people like Alice Weidel—that is dominated by by western German elites as a party that is dominated by an agenda that actually closer to the FDP in terms of wanting to liberalize the welfare state, not really offering any concrete things on the issues that you’ve mentioned. They don’t talk about how they would resolve the teacher shortage, how they would improve the situation in schools, in hospitals, the infrastructure that we don’t have, buses running in the rural countryside. But people don’t seem to care. They seem to say, “well, they’ll probably do a better job than the others.” It’s a bit like what we’ve seen with Trump. You know, you just put a slogan in. People are so desperate, they believe this guy, or this party, will do better.
But if you look behind this black and white spat that has been going on in the in these election campaigns—and you see this particularly with the BSW—once you start addressing issues—and you have to be careful as well, because if you say we need migration to resolve the teacher shortage, that’s obviously one issue. But the fact is—and this is what people experience every day—Germany is extremely over-bureaucratized. Teachers at schools, for example, quit school. Not just because you have problems like overwork and staff shortages, but because they can’t do what they’re actually expected to do. They can’t teach. They spend most of their time with administrative tasks. And this is an issue that not just the AfD has been talking about but particularly the BSW has picked up and has been actually talking about in greater detail by saying, “let’s free schools from bureaucracy. Let’s make sure that we invest in rural transport so that people can actually do what they’re expected to do and not use their car every day. Let’s make sure that we don’t have just western elites in top positions in the east. Let’s make sure that people in the east, if they say we’re not happy with supporting Ukraine in this war, in this conflict against Russia, let’s hear them and let’s listen to their voices.” And this might all be irrational. But this is what they expect. And this is why Wagenknecht has had quite a resonance when she was speaking. I saw her at the rally last week here in Chemnitz when she was simply saying, “this is not a regional issue. If we say we don’t want U.S. rockets on German soil, if we say we want to negotiate with Russia, this is an issue that the Saxons decide for themselves, and they need to be heard.” This is the voice for the region and the voice particularly for the people in the regions who say, “we have been forgotten, we are not being listened to.” And this talk about “die Lügenpresse” the journalists, the media, and the government elite: “they’re all in this boat where they say, well, they don’t actually see our problems. And so we need to either shout ourselves or we vote for parties that seem to at least care for what we what, what concerns we have here.”
Jeff Rathke
When we look a little bit more closely at the exit polling and other indications of where the support for the parties on the extremes is coming from—and that’s on the right to the AfD and on the left the BSW—it’s striking that in Saxony 43 percent of voters voted for those two parties. In Thuringia, it was 48.5 percent of voters who voted for those two parties. Parties which are, most mildly put, anti-system and certainly in the case of the AfD, which is certified by the domestic intelligence authorities to be right-wing extremist in their content and could even be subject to a party ban procedure. When Sahra Wagenknecht decided to form a party, some people thought, “hmm, actually this might be beneficial for the mainstream parties,” because she would draw support away from the AfD, especially people in the east who may be more comfortable with far-left views than far-right views. And that this could lead to basically a balancing out on the extremes of support, which would preserve in a way a functional space in the middle for the mainstream established parties. That seems not to be happening, but can you share a little more insight into what the dynamics are in people who are shifting party support from one to another?
Christian Schweiger
Well, if we look at the detailed polling results we’ve seen as you just said, the BSW has actually gained voters from the AfD but also across the board, from the SPD, from the Green Party, but also from the CDU. I’ve always said I think Wagenknecht as a figure, although she’s always portrayed by some living in western Germany as a former communist, she was obviously once in favor of this communist platform, she was also a member [of the communist SED Party]. She has been sharing ideas when she was young that Marxism is the only way forward. But now I think most people, particularly in the east, see her very much as a centrist politician who is simply not afraid to talk about things that they consider no longer to be the ones you can talk about. For example, to talk about the negative social effects of relatively uncontrolled migration. And Wagenknecht has been using this—and she’s obviously rhetorically brilliant—very prudently in trying to speak to all classes of voters, not just to the AfD voters who, as I just tried to outline why, are disillusioned for many reasons. Some are very angry. Some are also extremists in their views. But she’s also, I think, been quite successful in gaining people who were reluctant to vote for one of the mainstream parties again. CDU voters who said, “well, if I vote for them again, then nothing will change in terms of the education system.” SPD voters who said, “how can it be that they tell me you have to work hard and at the same time you get Ukrainian migrants who receive the Bürgergeld, long-term unemployment benefits, without any means testing.” So this feeling of being treated unjustly and not being listened to. She’s voiced that by simply saying, “I will say as things are and I will speak to anyone, young or old, about these issues.” And the result has been that we’ve seen—and I think any analyst points this out—not just with the BSW but with also younger voters, unfortunately, many of them moving to the AfD, surprisingly voters that four or five years ago used to vote in regional and on the federal level for the Green Party are now turning toward the AfD, but also increasingly toward the BSW because of this feeling that the Green Party is telling them how to live, is not listening to their concerns. And for my view, if Wagenknecht continues down this path, she has a chance to build the BSW into a party that is sort of an eastern Volkspartei, a catch-all party. And then you never know how the support will turn out in the west. I think that’s what particularly the CDU and also the SPD are very worried about.
Eric Langenbacher
So maybe we can return to the national level one more time to talk a little bit more about implications. Christian, do you think that these results will have any real impact on policy, especially when it comes to German defense policy and support for Ukraine? Do you see any possible implications there? What are your thoughts on policy implications at the national level?
Christian Schweiger
If we start with the latter, defense and particularly the issue of military support to Ukraine, the stance toward Russia’s aggressive military strategy, I doubt that there will be much change. We could see the government being a bit more conciliatory, being a bit more careful to reach out to eastern voters. But this current coalition on the federal level considers Germany’s strong embedment in NATO and a strong position against Russia’s expansive military strategy against Ukraine as an essential foreign policy issue. I think they will get some trouble if Wagenknecht manages to form coalitions with her party on the regional level, particularly in Saxony, where we have Michael Kretschmer being the odd one out—and the CDU has been criticizing this approach—who’s been saying we should negotiate with Russia. Then there will be some needles in the back of the coalition government, the traffic light coalition, but also the CDU. But overall, I think that won’t change much.
Where the big change will be is on migration; we’ve already seen it. That was also, in my opinion, a big mistake by the traffic light coalition following the Solingen attack and the whole discussion that Wagenknecht and the AfD picked up about, in their view, illegal migration: people shouldn’t be in the country who have been convicted, who are actually on the list to be returned to their home countries because their asylum claim has been rejected. To then, suddenly, two days before the regional elections, start returning people on planes and saying now we’ve started to expel people. That’s an issue where you can already see a change because of what has happened, and I think that will be an issue where they know if they don’t they don’t resolve it in a way that’s satisfactory for everyone so that we have a balance between, as you just said earlier, between still being an open, welcoming country attracting skilled labor, but at the same time making sure that we don’t have people who are criminal and who are abusing the asylum system, that they can stay on here without any consequences. To take this issue away, particularly from the AfD, that is something that I think is likely to happen, and to be honest, this is also, and to be fair to the BSW and to Wagenknecht, this is something that Sahra Wagenknecht has always pointed out that she doesn’t want an issue that is constantly on the agenda. She wants this to be resolved so that the AfD loses one of its main appeals in electoral campaigns.
On the other issues we’ve mentioned, health care, the education system, it’s very, very complicated. If I said to you now, well, there will be a big change in the German education system. Well then, we would have to say, “where does it start?” It has to start in each of the regions. The only thing I could say is maybe we will see a different schooling policy in Saxony if the BSW is part of the government. And in Thuringia, things might change in some areas. But a lot of things are decided on the regional level, so I don’t think this will affect the agenda of the Ampel.
The other big issue that will definitely change and has already changed: the Greens will struggle very much in putting forward or pushing through the environmental agenda, because the SPD and the FDP note this is no longer a vote winner. Habeck is somebody who is now toast on this issue. Everybody who listens to him says, “well, we know what’s coming. You want us to change our lifestyle, and you’re trying to push this through.” I think this is where the Greens particularly will lose a very important issue for their own electoral appeal. And this is why we never know how the Greens will behave if things get worse for them. But that’s where I see the main changes. Definitely not on foreign policy.
Jeff Rathke
Well, I think what we have then ahead of us are at the national level, as you just said, Christian, the likelihood of some significant changes on the migration policy side. And of course these results are a harbinger of a very tough election year taking shape for the federal government with the federal elections on the docket for September 2025, unless something urgent happens before then. So we have seen the outlines already of a heavily contested federal election. Well, Christian Schweiger, I want to thank you for spending time with us today and for sharing your insights and the results of your work as a scholar. Eric Langenbacher, thanks for being with us and for framing the conversation. And to all of our listeners, we look forward to having you with us again soon on the next episode of The Zeitgeist.
