On March 13, German voters in the states of Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate), Sachsen-Anhalt (Saxony-Anhalt) and Baden-Württemberg will go to the polls to elect new state legislatures. The DKE International Elections Digest published last weekend provides a short summary on each election. But there is more to say!

Baden-Württemberg: Green Power

If you will read anything about these elections in the English-language press, it will likely focus on the race in Baden-Württemberg, one of the country's largest and most prosperous states. It's definitely an interesting one: traditionally a conservative state, Baden-Württemberg's politics were upended when the Green Party scored a surprise result with no less than 24% of the vote in the 2011 state elections. That was twice as much as it had ever gotten, and got it a symbolically important, unprecedented second place ahead of the social-democratic SPD. Subsequently those two parties formed a coalition government, locking the christian-democratic CDU out of state government for the first time in almost 60 years.

The christian-democrats were confident the result would remain a fluke, blaming it on the fall-out of mass protests over the Stuttgart 21 project and more in particular, the in Germany particularly strong public reaction to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, which happened in the same month as the elections. But the Green Prime Minister, Winfried Kretschmann, has proven very popular, and his party seems set to easily outdo its 2011 result. While some of its gains have come at the expense of cannibalizing half of the SPD's support base, its appeal has reached well beyond that too. The election campaign, which the Greens have largely centered on Kretschmann's popularity, seems to have been particularly good for the party: last month the party surpassed the CDU for the first time. The Christian-Democrats, in their turn, are burdened by a boring lead candidate, party divisions over the refugees issue (with said state leader opposing Chancellor Merkel from the right), and the related bleeding of votes to the anti-refugee, anti-Muslim, Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD).

As the International Elections Digest pointed out, the Greens were somewhat distracted by the arrest of Volker Beck, a major Green politician who also happens to be from Baden-Württemberg, for the possession of crystal meth (seriously). The Greens have long advocated a more relaxed policy towards ‘soft drugs’ like weed, but obviously meth is quite a different thing. Plus, as a political analyst pointed out to Deutsche Welle, the reason the Greens are leading in Baden-Württemberg right now is because “they're fishing far beyond their pond". They're not just dealing anymore with the usual Green voters, who might care less than most about drugs; “they have moved far beyond their core constituency, into those that think more conservatively, more faith-based, more rules-based people - with those people this behavior doesn't go down well." We'll see what, if any, electoral fall-out there will be. For now, the polls look rosy:

Baden-Württemberg: state of the polls Election

result 2011 average of

january polls average of

march polls CDU 39% 35% 29% greens 24% 28% 33% spd 23% 14% 13% fdp 5% 6% 7% left 3% 3% 4% afd - 11% 12% others 6% 3% 3%

As a model for Green Party success, the election will be both instructive and limited in applicability. Kretschmann has proven no typical Green Party politician, pulling the party a fair amount to the right, to the point where he even seemed to criticize Merkel over the refugees issue from the right. He also simply seems to be a rare political talent who is well at home in his state: a down-to-earth guy who is as comfortable in the traditionalist rural parts of the state as in the larger cities and university towns where the Greens do best. According to one recent poll, voters would opt for him over his CDU challenger and the leading candidate for the SPD by 51% to 12% and 8%, respectively, if they could elect the Prime Minister directly. Not just would 44% of the SPD voters opt for him, even 44% of the CDU's own voters would prefer him!

Sachsen-Anhalt: a very different story

I wanted to focus on one of the other states, though — Sachsen-Anhalt. Maybe because it's in the East, maybe because I've visited a few times.

Sachsen-Anhalt is the smallest and poorest of the three states which are voting, and located in the east of the country, in the former GDR. A kind of forgotten corner of it as well, where heavy and chemical industries provided many jobs under communism but largely collapsed afterward. Until 2005 unemployment in the state remained at 20%, and while it has fallen to 11% since, that's still well over the national average. Net disposable household income stands at $1,000, two-thirds of the national number. Yet when asked what the most important and urgent political issue is, the percentage which answered “the labor market situation” (61%) was rivaled by “the refugee situation” (60%).

Although the most recent, widely-reported arson attack in Germany on an asylum-seeker center took place in the neighboring state of Sachsen, which tops most rankings of extreme-right violence against refugees, a village in Sachsen-Anhalt called Tröglitz made the news last year for similar reasons. A prospective asylum-seeker center there was torched and neo-nazis went as far as threatening to behead the local MP. A study last year showed that “respondents from Saxony-Anhalt emerged as the most anti-immigrant of Germany's regions, with 42.2 percent making xenophobic statements in interviews conducted for the study”.

It's perhaps not entirely surprising, then, that polls for Saxony-Anhalt suggest losses for all of the three main left-of-center parties, and a depressingly impressive result for the Alternative for Germany, which is polling at 17-19%.

In general, East-Germany has been kind to the left for most of the postcommunist era, thanks to strong numbers for the Left Party (and the ex-communist PDS before it). But Angela Merkel's popularity in the East eroded the left's relative advantage in the last decade, and now, even as Merkel's own popularity has sagged significantly, it's the rise of the AfD that's adding to the trend, since it is particularly strong in the east.

In Sachsen-Anhalt, where state elections sometimes diverged from the federal trends for East-Germany in general, left-of-center parties pooled a whopping 60% of the vote in 1994 and 59% in 1998, with the social-democratic SPD pulling over a third of the vote and the PDS almost a fifth. This yielded a then-unprecedented and extremely controversial arrangement where the SPD (initially in coalition with the Greens) formed a minority government which relied on the PDS for parliamentary support. In the 2002 state elections the SPD lost heavily; left-of-center parties fell to 43% when added up, and a right-wing government took over. (It should be noted, though, that just half a year later the SPD reigned supreme in the state's vote in the federal elections, and left-of-center parties in total pooled over 60%; a testament to East-German voters being much more willing to change parties and camps than their peers in the West). Since 2007 the state has a “grand coalition” of christian-democrats and social-democrats, and thanks in part to the Greens finally (re)gaining a foothold in the state, left-of-center parties have recovered ground to pool 51% in 2006 and 56% in 2011. But now they'd barely get over 40%, if the polls are to be trusted. It might even turn out to be worse: like other far-right parties, the AfD tends to overperform the polls).

If you take the average of the last four polls (each conducted by a different pollster), this is what you get:

Sachsen-Anhalt: State of the polls ELECTION

RESULT 2011 AVERAGE OF

MARCH POLLS CDU 33% 31% left 24% 20% spd 22% 16% greens 7% 5% fdp 4% 4% afd - 18% others 11%* 6% *incl. 5% for the

extr-right NPD

One thing that would be interesting to see, if there will be exit polling showing this kind of data, is the extent to which these numbers reflect the SPD and the Left losing votes directly to the AfD, and to which extent they lose voters to the CDU, which in turn loses votes to the AfD. I don't doubt many working class voters of both the SPD and the Left will defect directly to the AfD. Still, I wonder — with an eye as well on how many people vote on the basis of national politics rather than state-specific concerns — if some other voters of left-wing parties might go over to the CDU in appreciation of Merkel's success in seeming moderate and centrist, not least on the refugee issue.