A far-right party could hold the balance of power in Germany after sweeping to second place in a historic election.
Exit polls, issued after voting ended, suggest AfD (Alternative for Germany) – a party under intelligence service surveillance as a suspected extremist organisation – has won around 20% of the vote.
Called after the collapse of the Social Democrat-led coalition, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling party is expected to drop to third place. It is a ‘historic defeat’, the party’s general secretary concedes.
Meanwhile the Free Democrats, who pulled the plug on the government, may barely scrape the 5% required to win seats, if they do at all.
With the right-wing CDU and CSU bloc emerging far ahead on 29%, any government is almost certain to be led by their leader Friedrich Merz. He has already declared victory.
‘The world out there is not waiting for us, nor is it waiting for lengthy coalition talks and negotiations’, he told supporters in Berlin.
‘We must now quickly regain our ability to act so that we can do the right thing at home, so that we are once again present in Europe, so that the world can see that Germany is being governed reliably again.’
Previously unthinkable due to mainstream parties’ refusal to work with the far-right, Merz may turn to the AfD to secure his role as Chancellor.
Election results and political divisions mean there may be few alternatives.
Merz’s CDU has celebrated the demise of the so-called ‘traffic light coalition’ of the Social Democratic Party, Greens and Free Democrats.
His Bavarian partners, the CSU, have all but ruled out working with the Greens.
And Scholz, who conceded defeat on Sunday, remains firmly opposed to working with the AfD.
Decrying that ‘an extreme right-wing party like the AfD is getting such election results’, he said: ‘That must never be something that we will accept. I will not accept it and never will…. No cooperation with the extreme right.’
But the AfD is feeling emboldened, and not just by these latest results – more than double their previous result, and the highest for a far-right party since Adolf Hitler’s Nazis topped the poll in 1933.
‘Our hand remains outstretched to form a government’, party leader Alice Weidel said this evening.
In a campaign dominated by the issue of migration, the AfD issued flyers resembling ‘deportation tickets’.
Despite being a lesbian with a Sri Lankan partner, party leader Alice Weidel has advocated for the mass deportation of people with migrant backgrounds.
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