by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
Nearly as important as the US Presidential elections this year are the state elections in Germany this month. All of the states that have gone or will go to the polls are strongholds for outsider, anti-globalist Alternative for Germany (AfD).
But why would state elections in the former East Germany be so important ?
It’s not because populism is popular, though that is an unqualified good thing.
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It is because there’s much more at stake here than it appears at first glance, due to the vagaries of the German constitution. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Yesterday voters in Saxony and Thuringia nearly moved the ruling German coalition in Berlin into panic mode, possibly collapse by following through and voting in record numbers for AfD.
The problem is that it wasn’t quite enough to cause a political earthquake by creating definitive results which the German political elite would have to weather. It looks like the demonization campaign of Afd in 2024 was just effective enough to preserve the political status quo in Germany for a little while longer, even if it means unstable coalitions in Saxony and Thuringia.
Brandenburg is on the clock for the 22nd and things are trending badly for the Scholz government in Berlin there as well.
The German political establishment, very much of the Davosian persuasion, knew AfD would do well in these elections. Previous results and extreme machinations in 2019 were needed to keep AfD out of the government in Thuringia. AfD was projecting to win, and did win, there, while in Saxony it would come down to voter turnout as to whether it would beat the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
They failed by a single point against very high voter turnout, over 73%.
They spent all of 2024 creating scandal after scandal to freeze voters in place, ramping up the “far right” rhetoric to 11 while trotting out every tired canard about their plans to deport everyone and lynch immigrants.
If you think the Democrats’ rhetoric surrounding Project 2025 and Der Trumpenfuhrer here in the US is over the top, you seriously don’t read German media. It’s nearly British in its tenuous relationship with anything resembling the truth.
For ten years now, there has been a cordon sanitaire around AfD, with all of the other parties refusing to form coalitions with them. So the goals for AfD this time were more subtle than just winning the elections. That’s good for party building and the future, but sadly, the future of Europe is now.
Because without an outright majority they would never take power, nor was its leadership under any illusions that anything would change if they didn’t.
Merkel’s Legacy – Globalism’s Trifecta of Vetoes
To understand the current situation one has to go back to the 2017-19 election cycle where then Chancellor Angela Merkel pulled every string and called in every marker she had to 1) freeze out AfD and 2) hand an effective majority in the German upper house, the Bundesrat, to the Green Party.
The Bundesrat has 69 seats currently and is made up of caucuses from each of the states in Germany. Seats are apportioned on a population basis to each state with the parties in each state government getting representation in that state’s caucus.
So, while AfD garnered 24% of the 2019 vote, if the other parties can cobble together a 51% coalition of the seats in the Thuringian parliament they form a government. Then Thuringia’s 4 seats in the Bundesrat are doled out to each party in the coalition. In this case it was the communists from Die Linke, the militant (and Globalist) Greens, and the nominally center-right but equally globalist CDU.
But here’s the kicker and the key to understanding why AfD’s success this time still wasn’t good enough.
States in the Bundesrat vote as a block.
I repeat.
States in the Bundesrat vote as a block.
This means if the Greens control any seat in a state’s government they can and will veto anything they disagree with. The same goes for any party with a state caucus majority. And coming into yesterday’s elections the Greens effectively controlled 44 of the 69 seats in the Bundesrat. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ Social Democrats (SPD) controlled 42 seats. The other party with veto power is the CDU (43 seats).
So, these three states represent 12 seats and a wipe out of the Greens at the state level in these three elections would remove their veto power. The same would happen for the SPD. I remind you they are the two major parties in the national government.
