Merkel’s Bavarian Allies Bleed Votes to Center-Left Greens and Far Right

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Katharina Schulze, right, and Ludwig Hartmann, the co-lead candidates of the Greens, on Sunday at the Bavarian Parliament in Munich.CreditCreditSean Gallup/Getty Images

By Katrin Bennhold

Oct. 14, 2018

BERLIN — Voters in Bavaria, the German state that formed the front line of the 2015 migration crisis, abandoned the governing conservatives in droves in an election on Sunday. But rather than shifting their allegiance mostly to the anti-immigrant far right, they gave the biggest boost to a new centrist force: the pro-refugee Greens.

The Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives — and a key component of her fragile coalition government — lost its absolute majority and was on course to see its vote share slump to 36.2 percent, initial exit polls suggested.

The far-right Alternative for Germany party was expected to win 10.9 percent of the vote, allowing it to enter the Bavarian Parliament for the first time.

But the big winner of Sunday’s closely watched regional election were the Greens — a onetime fringe party that has quietly risen to become a new centrist force across Germany. Their share of the vote looked set to double to 18.1 percent, making the party the second-strongest in a region long considered one of Germany’s most conservative — and possibly a coalition partner in the next Bavarian government.

The election result, which also saw the Ms. Merkel’s other coalition partner, the Social Democrats, collapse and fall behind the far right, is certain to reverberate in Berlin, where some see it as a harbinger of further losses for Ms. Merkel’s conservatives, already at a postwar low. In two weeks, her party is expected to lose ground — and possibly the whole election — in another regional election, in the state of Hesse.

Natascha Kohnen, the leading candidate of the Social Democrats, whose vote share collapsed on Sunday.CreditLukas Barth-Tuttas/EPA, via Shutterstock

The far right was quick to make the connection. Calling the Bavarian result a “signal for Merkel,” Katrin Ebner-Steiner of the Alternative for Germany told supporters on Sunday night that “Merkel has to go.”

The Greens meanwhile celebrated a victory that only a year ago few would have thought possible.

“My heart jumped!” Katharina Schulze, the leader of the Bavarian Greens, said shortly after the first forecasts were made public.

Originally founded as a single-issue environmental protest party, the Greens have become the most consistent voice in favor of migration — and as such the clearest challengers of a resurgent far right.

Recent polls suggest that the party’s strategy is working, and not only in Bavaria: A recent survey asking voters which party they would choose in the next election found that the Greens are now the country’s second party, one percentage point ahead of Alternative for Germany, and only nine behind Merkel’s conservatives.

Strikingly, the Social Democrats, long the main opposition party on the center left but now the other member of Ms. Merkel’s coalition, was forecast to collapse to 9.6 percent in Bavaria.

Regional elections in Germany once attracted little attention elsewhere — particularly in Bavaria, where the conservatives held an absolute majority for all but one term since 1962.

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Alice Weidel, center, the Alternative for Germany chairwoman, cheering with supporters in Mamming, Germany, on Sunday as early exit poll results were announced.CreditLennart Preiss/EPA, via Shutterstock

But in the current polarized political climate the Bavarian election is seen as a measure of how much the political battle lines have been redrawn in Germany and Europe — by feelings over migration, by the rise of the far right and by the collapse of the political center.

The arrival in Germany of more than a million migrants since 2015 has shaken consensus in a nation unaccustomed to the kind of political fragmentation long established in neighboring countries. Bavaria, which had four parties in its Parliament, may now have to get used to at least six.

The election was in many ways a test case for how to win back disaffected voters.

Perhaps its most interesting outcome is that the nativist slogans of Alternative for Germany — calling for an end to “asylum tourism” and vowing to protect Germany’s borders — failed to give the party the major lift many had predicted a few months ago.

The same slogans, widely borrowed by conservative leaders afraid to be outflanked by the far right, also failed to help them — instead, they appear to have sent a sizable faction of centrist voters to the Greens. Forty percent of the new Green supporters across Germany come from the center right of the political spectrum, according to research by the Forsa Institute.

“We did not achieve a good result,” Markus Söder, the conservative premier of Bavaria, told supporters in Munich shortly after the first exit polls were published. “We will have to learn lessons.”

One open question is whether the leader of the Bavarian conservatives, Horst Seehofer, will survive his party’s drubbing — both as party chief and interior minister in Ms. Merkel’s cabinet. Mr. Seehofer is a longtime vocal critic of the chancellor and her migration policy, and his departure would free Ms. Merkel of a minister who almost brought down her government twice in the last three months.