German coalition

EU vote humiliates Scholz’s German coalition

European Parliament election rout renews questions about whether Berlin government will survive.

BY MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG AND NETTE NÖSTLINGER

Germany’s ruling coalition suffered a crushing blow in the European Parliament election on Sunday, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats recording their worst result in a national vote in more than a century.

The left-leaning coalition’s steep losses — support for the Greens fell by nearly half — will likely renew questions over the government’s stability. The alliance, a three-way partnership that includes the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, has struggled to find answers to an array of acute problems facing the country, from a stagnant economy to the deep dysfunction of its asylum system. 

Though regular elections aren’t due until the fall of 2025, persistent infighting within the alliance over everything from Russia’s war on Ukraine to the budget has fueled speculation that the government could collapse well before then.

The center-right Christian Democrats were the clear victors on Sunday, winning 30.2 percent of the vote according to a projection for German public television.

The extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) also put in a strong showing, finishing second with 16 percent, a gain of 5 percentage points compared to the 2019 EU election. The party has capitalized on growing concerns in the country over a huge influx of asylum seekers in the past decade.

Meanwhile, Scholz’s Social Democrats garnered less than 14 percent, an extraordinary decline for a party that has long been a pillar of Germany’s political landscape. In 2019, the party won just 15.8 percent, which at the time was also considered a disastrous result.

The latest loss is a particular humiliation for Scholz, who, despite his dismal approval ratings, insisted that he should be the face of the campaign alongside the party’s lead candidate for the Europe race, Katarina Barley.

“It’s pretty clear we didn’t get any tailwind” from Berlin, Barley said after polls closed Sunday, calling the result “bitter.”

Finger-pointing aside, the real question is whether Scholz’s government will survive. German coalitions rarely collapse before the end of a term, but this one is atypical because it includes three parties instead of the customary two, which makes it more volatile.

What’s more, given the magnitude of the coalition’s slide in voters’ estimation — Sunday’s result suggests only about 30 percent of Germans still support the alliance — some argue the government has lost its legitimacy.

Similar concerns prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to call a new parliamentary election following his withering defeat to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in Sunday’s poll.

Nonetheless, all three German parties worry that pulling the plug on the power-sharing government would just worsen their predicament. 

That’s particularly true of the smallest of the three coalition members, the liberal conservative Free Democratic Party, who have bristled at the tax-and-spend instincts of their partners. Party leader Christian Lindner, who is also finance minister, has been at odds with Green leaders for months over the government’s spending priorities.

And yet, with the party winning just 5 percent of the vote on Sunday, the party’s survival is in question. If it were to fall below 5 percent in the next Bundestag election, for example, the party would be shut out.

If Sunday’s projections are confirmed in the final results, it will be seen as a big success for the AfD, which has been beset by scandals in recent months.

German conservatives first, far-right AfD second in EU election: Early projection

The party’s top two candidates for the EU election were implicated in a series of sensational allegations of misconduct involving suspected espionage and potential Russian influence. Most recently, the party’s lead candidate, Maximilian Krah, was forced to stop campaigning after he defended members of Hitler’s Waffen-SS as not “automatically” criminals.

The Greens are projected to finish with 11.9 percent, an 8.6 percentage point drop in support compared to the 2019 European election, making the party the biggest loser of the election.

Germany’s new populist party, Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), which combines left-wing economic policies with right-wing cultural views, arrived on the political landscape with a projected result of 6.1 percent. The party was founded by Sahra Wagenknecht, the longtime face of The Left party, which has been in crisis since her departure and was projected to end up with 2.7 percent.