Berlin – German elections are generally proud to be reliably boring. Not this time.
The third largest economy in the world goes to the polls on Sunday in the shadow of unusually abrupt interventions of the Trump administration in support of the extreme right anti -immigration. Meanwhile, a series of high profile attacks in the streets of Germany, last Friday in the Berlin Holocaust memorial, has led to the campaign debates accused about immigration.
The favorite to become chancellor is Friedrich Merz, 69, the straight leader and with glasses from the Christian Democratic Union Center-Right, or CDU. He has questioned Germany’s future relationship with the United States.
“I hope that [the U.S] It is still a democracy and does not slide into an authoritarian populist system, ”Merz told a campaign event in Darmstadt on Thursday. “But it may be that the United States enters a longer period of instability and that this populism, this autocratic behavior of the heads of state, will continue for a longer period of time.”
At home, Merz wants to cut the regulatory bureaucracy and corporations tax, while hardening Germany’s borders in what critics say it is an attempt to simulate their rivals on the hard right. He faces the owner Olaf Scholz, 66, whose left central social democratic union, or SPD, has fought to deal with the twin economic crises of consequences and pandemic war in Ukraine.
But, without a doubt, the great story is the alternative for Germany, whose voting figures of 21% would double their support from the latest elections in 2021, and would probably put it second. Directed by Alice Weidel, 36, the extreme right and anti-immigration and anti-Muslim party is under surveillance due to the suspicion of extremism by the country’s national intelligence agency itself.
The proportional multiple system of Germany is designed to make it difficult for one of the parties to win directly, which means that they must work together and govern by coalition. The CDU leads 28%surveys, SPD languishing at 16%. Robert Habeck, 55, directs the Greens, currently with 13%.
Other parties, such as the Socialist Die Linke and business -free Democrats, will hope to achieve the threshold of 5% necessary to enter Bundestag.
The voting stations known as “Wahllokale” will open at 8 am and will close at 6 PM local (2 am – Noon et) on Sunday. Shortly after, an exit survey will fall that has historically given an accurate idea of the final results. In the next few hours, during the night until Monday morning, the results will enter.
Most of the eyes will be in the AFD. Its increase is part of a trend throughout alarming liberal and centrist, so once, nationalist parties are gaining profits throughout the continent at the expense of the political establishment.
“We believe it is unthinkable that fascism can return to Europe, but it has done it, it is here,” said Marina Weisband, an outstanding activist, author and psychologist. “The established parties have no answers,” added Weisband, founding director of Classroom, a project to strengthen the education of democracy in German schools. “What the parties in Germany do mainly is to keep the system in operation. But the system itself doesn’t work so well. “
As with several of these nationalist European movements, the White House has established ties with the AFD, which has been supported by Trump Elon Musk advisor and vice president JD Vance.
Andreas Busch, Professor of Political Science at the University of Göttingen, believes that, surprisingly that these interventions have been, they have not promoted the domestic surveys of the AFD.
“The needle has not moved a little,” he said. “They have dragged slowly but surely in opinion polls,” he added. “And that has been happening for a long time before Musk said something.”
The AFD rejects labels such as the extreme right and fascist. “It’s Bulls —“, Marc Bernhard, one of its legislators, told NBC News at a rack in Karlsruhe this week. The White House and the AFD Weidel leader did not respond to the requests for comments on their relationship or political and rhetoric of the party.
The rise of AFD is particularly surprising in Germany, such a cautious country of its own Nazi past that has informal political laws and pacts aimed at stopping the return of fascism. One of these is the “Firewall”, an agreement of the parties so as not to work with extreme right -wing parts such as AFD. That is why it is unlikely that the party enters any coalition after the vote, even if it surveys strongly.
“No one expects AFD to form a government in this election,” Busch said. “Therefore, it is difficult to evaluate how seriously they must be taken.”
These attempts to control the AFD has become a problem of the soap box for AFD legislators, whose exciting ones cry that their freedom of expression is being restricted by musk and others.
Potential coalition options include a CDU-GREEN alliance. Or even a call “great coalition”, or Groko, between the CDU and the SPD, the two historically bigger games just to the right and the left of the center. Some see the danger in this, since it would anoint the AFD as the official opposition.
These coalition conversations can take months, and get the wrong bedmates can be expensive. Scholz’s “traffic light coalition” with the free green and the Democrats was harassed by internal struggles, finally implicating on an argument of budget deficit in November, preparing the scenario for the quick survey of Sunday.
The idea that two rivals join the force may seem strange to the Polarized American ears, but the Groko was repeatedly used by the imperative Merkel during his 16 years in power, and typifies the type of moderate consensus that the German politics drives
The AFD would argue that it is exactly this type of group thinking of the main establishment that led Germany to the West to the multiple crises today.
The country is undoubtedly with a low reflux. Once the industrial power of Europe, its economy is on the verge of recession. He no longer enjoys the cheap natural gas pumped to Europe by Russian president Vladimir Putin, with Western powers according to stop taking out of the WellSpring from Pariah. And its former China export market has become an economic competitor, challenging the automotive industry inherited from Germany with cheaper and high quality electric vehicles.
Then there is the question of the United States, which for decades has signed the military security of Germany by positioning US troops in the German soil as a warning first to the Soviet Union and now Russia. That guarantee looks in its current form, with President Donald Trump openly questioning the postwar security pact with NATO countries.
Although it is a military power in the back seat since World War II, Germany has increased its military budget after years of not complying with NATO minimum guidelines. Even so, many experts say that, like the third largest economy in the world, it is still doing very little, and increasing the defense budget even more will exercise more tension in its sick economy.
While Germany prepares to celebrate 70 years in the Military Alliance in May, Merz questioned Washington’s future as her Keystone member.
“Will Americans still be there?” He told the Darmstadt event. “Eight weeks ago I would not have dared to ask this question, but today we have to give him an answer.”
