Germany: Scholz laments 'bitter' Saxony, Thuringia votes

The election commissioner for Saxony has said that the seat tallies published in preliminary final results gave one too many seats to the CDU and AfD, and one too few to the SPD and the Greens. 

The state's election commission said a software failure had led to the publication of the erroneous data. 

The change is significant in that it means the AfD is on course for 39 seats, not 40. In the 120-seat chamber, possessing 40 seats would have meant the AfD could have blocked any legislation requiring a two-thirds supermajority by itself. Now it would fall one short. 

However, the chances of future governments in either Saxony or Thuringia passing or seeking to pass such supermajority legislation in the coming years does not seem particularly high given how difficult it will likely be just to find coalitions wielding simple majorities.

Monday's announcement boosts the SPD to 11 seats, the Greens to 7, and pushes the CDU down to 41.

The co-leader of the populist left-wing BSW or Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, Amira Mohamed Ali, said that the party's principal condition for joining a coalition would be for a future state government to speak up on foreign policy issues. 

In particular, the BSW advocates a referendum in Germany on plans to station more US missiles in the country, a halt to German weapons deliveries to Ukraine, and peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv.

Ali said it now lay with potential coalition partners, most of the all the CDU, to decide "whether they could envisage that." 

State governments are not responsible for foreign policy under Germany's federal system. 

Nevertheless, Ali said a state government could still raise its voice, and potentially even initiate motions in Germany's upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, where states have more influence.

Ali also said she believed Saxony state premier Michael Kretschmer's personal positions on these issues might be rather closer to her party than that of the CDU, based on some of his previous comments on Ukraine. 

She also said her party ruled out cooperation with the AfD — the two populist parties combined would wield a majority in Thuringia, and would come close to one in Saxony.

Saxony's state premier Michael Kretschmer of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) described a potential alliance involving the new populist left-wing BSW party as at least a possibility, if not a simple one. 

"It won't be easy, and it will also take time, but it is possible," Kretschmer said of the prospect. 

"I wish to serve this state, I wish to give this state a stable government," he told Deutschlandfunk on Monday. "And we will see whether others want that too."

 

Kretschmer's CDU won 31.9% of the vote in Saxony, just ahead of the AfD on 30.6%.

If Kretschmer could find common ground with the "Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance" (or BSW) belonging to the breakaway former Left Party leader, it would make it much simpler to reach a majority of 61 seats in the state parliament. 

As it stands, the CDU, Social Democrats and Greens would only command a combined 59 seats.

The BSW is on course for 15 seats, while the projected 40 AfD lawmakers in Saxony appear destined to lead the opposition in the state parliament.

But Kretschmer said his party was still "far, far away" from coalition talks and would first need to "breathe deeply" and digest the outcome together. He warned it could take months to finalize a new government. 

Kretschmer also played down Wagenknecht's own role in any potential negotiations. 

"We would not be forming a coalition with Mrs. Wagenknecht, but rather with people elected to Saxony's state parliament," he said.

The leaders of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) , Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla, both said early on Monday that their party should be part of the next governments in Thuringia and Saxony. 

"Of course we have a government mandate," Weidel said on ZDF public television. 

She said that voters in both states had indicated their desire for what she termed a centrist and right-wing coalition involving the AfD. 

Weidel said she did not believe that the center-right CDU's pledge not to govern in coalition with or with support from the AfD could hold following Sunday's results.

"We want to wait and see how the CDU will behave over time," Weidel said. 

Tino Chrupalla, meanwhile, tried to entice Saxony's CDU state premier Winfried Kretschmer into coalition talks in a radio interview, after the CDU remained the largest party in the state. 

"With whom does he want to deliver his campaign promises?" Chrupalla asked on Deutschlandfunk. "That would more likely work with us, I think, than for instance with the SPD or the Greens." 

The leader of the AfD in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, made similar comments on Sunday night after the results. 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the news agency Reuters the results of the state elections were "bitter" for his Social Democrats (SPD), saying he was speaking in his capacity as an SPD parliamentarian not as chancellor. 

"All democratic parties are now called upon to form stable governments without right-wing extremists," Scholz said, in reference to the AfD. He said the party's success on Sunday was concerning. 

"Our country cannot and must not become accustomed to this," Scholz said. "The AfD damages our country. It weakens the economy, divides society, and ruins our country's reputation." 

Nevertheless, Scholz also tried to find the positives from a party political perspective. 

"The election results of Sunday are bitter — also for us. And yet, the SPD stuck together," he said, adding that thought the party had conducted a good and clear campaign. 

"That paid off, because the bleak prognoses regarding the SPD did not come to pass," he said. 

Although it's true that the SPD avoided losing its representation in the two eastern state parliaments altogether, as some pollsters believed to be a possibility, in both states the center-left party won less than 10% of the vote and only narrowly cleared the 5% minimum hurdle to guarantee representation.

The eastern German states of Saxony and Thuringia voted on Sunday, with the far-right AfD faring roughly as well as expected in the run-up to the vote in its strongest regions in Germany. 

The AfD was the largest single party in Thuringia with 32.8% of votes under its controversial state leader Björn Höcke, the first time it's achieved this in a German state since it was founded in 2013.

The Christian Democrats were a fairly distant second followed by the new left-wing populist BSW party set up by Sahra Wagenknecht, and then Germany's older socialist Left Party, which Wagenknecht broke away from. 

Two of the parties in federal government in Germany, the Greens and the pro-business FDP, missed the 5% threshold entirely and won no representation in Thuringia.

The Social Democrats of Chancellor Olaf Scholz claimed a meager 6.1%.

The AfD also finished a close second to the Christian Democrats in Saxony, with the CDU on 31.9% and the AfD on 30.6%.

No other party won more than 12% of the vote and again the parties in Germany's national government were mauled: The Greens and the SPD just scraped into the state parliament on single-digit support and the FDP missed the 5% hurdle altogether.

msh/lo (AP, AFP, KNA, dpa, Reuters)