Centrists suck (in charts!)
Germany doesn't have a far-right problem. It has a centrist-liberal one.
The votes are in from Sunday’s elections in Hesse and Bavaria — two big, rich, states in western Germany. In classic German fashion, nothing has changed: The existing ruling coalitions in both did well enough to keep ruling.
Also in classic German fashion: Other things happened.
In Hesse, which has a particular affinity for far-right extremism at the institutional level, the xenophobic AfD is now the second-strongest party. If it were any other party, they would probably join a government coalition, but all the others are still insisting they won’t work with the AfD. Nonetheless, the election result makes the right-wing populists the largest opposition, giving them not insignificant legislative privileges.
In Bavaria, home to all the Austro-German stereotypes living in your head, voters had not one, but two!, parties to choose from that are further to the right of the Christian Social Union, which dominates Bavarian politics and whose one-time leader Franz Josef Strauß famously said should be the party furthest to the right on the spectrum of respectable democratic politics.
So much for that.
Put those two together, and more than 30 percent of Bavarian voters went for right-wing populists. Although the Greens came out with a not totally embarrassing result and already govern with conservatives elsewhere in Germany, the CSU will nonetheless continue its hard-right coalition with the Free Voters. Unlike the person-non-grata AfD, the Free Voters remains politically palatable to work with and actually improved on its 2018 result.
While the easy headline here is the success of conservative forces, the real story is the failure of centrist-liberal ones. For the sake of simplification, let’s just consider the fates of the Social Democrats and the Greens, which are the big ones in the middle-ish and, along with the liberal Free Democrats, rule Germany at the federal level under an increasingly disliked Chancellor Olaf Scholz. State elections are often taken as a bellwether of how voters feel about the direction of the country overall.
A trend of mismanaged policy and bad messaging, which we see across Europe, continues to plague the liberal mind. We see proof of this in my favorite kind of election data: voter migration.
Bavaria
SPD/Greens lost 360,000 voters to CSU, AfD, and Free Voters:
Another 90,000 SPD/Green voters just didn’t vote:
Hesse
SPD/Greens lost 201,000 voters to the AfD and the ruling conservatives (CDU):
Another 85,000 SPD/Green voters just didn’t vote:
In the inverse, the trends are smaller. The centrist parties also failed to pick up significant new voters. Their ongoing failure is all the more spectacular in light of polls showing that Germans are doing fine but feeling worse. The juxtaposition suggests right-wing spoilers are cleaning up on messaging, regardless of actual policy.
From local sentiment to European-wide movements, the illiberal surge is getting kinda old. So too is the liberal incompetence to counter it. To win new voters, and win back the ones they’ve lost, these parties need to come up with something better than, “we are less bad.”
The real winners from Sunday’s elections in western Germany are eastern Germans, whom we can stop hating on for their authoritarian sentiment. Liberalism is just less entrenched in the former communist East than the victorious capitalist West, so resentment over its shortcomings are closer to the surface and quicker to show itself. Germany’s eastern states will hold elections in 2024, along with votes for European Parliament, U.S. president, and possibly Ukraine’s, which makes next year a big one for the course of western democratic politics.