German party’s lurch to the right likely to benefit AfD and Greens in regional vote on Sunday

Katrin Ebner-Steiner huddles in a bus shelter, hacking at a plum cake with a flimsy plastic fork. The Bavarian face of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is on the campaign trail, but she can afford to take time for a coffee break. Polls for Sunday’s regional election in Germany’s wealthy southern state predict the far-right party will comfortably enter Bavaria’s parliament for the first time, and help deny the once dominant Christian Social Union (CSU) its majority for only the second time since 1966.

“The people here want a return to law and order,” says Ebner-Steiner, peering out over a quaint and apparently peaceful town square in Deggendorf, lower Bavaria. Nearly 20% of votes in this district went to the anti-immigrant party at September’s national election. It is a result the party hopes to repeat at the regional vote on Sunday, the first time Germany’s fastest-growing party has run in Bavaria.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Regional election posters for the AfD and the Bayernpartei in Bavaria. Photograph: Armin Weigel/AFP/Getty Images

“Fundamentally, people in Deggendorf and across Bavaria are doing really well,” says the town’s mayor, Christian Moser of the CSU, the sister party to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. “But the AfD are playing with people’s feelings. Anyone can make people nervous with the issue of security. We report the facts, but then they say the facts are false. But those are the facts. I can’t change people’s emotions.”

It is on the issue of immigration that emotions continue to run high. In Deggendorf, Ebner-Steiner and the AfD have fuelled simmering resentment over a nearby reception centre housing up to 1,500 asylum seekers. While police say the new arrivals have made no difference to the local crime rate, the AfD candidate insists attacks on women are going unreported. Opponents say it is the kind of fearmongering that is difficult to disprove.



Not to be outdone in tough talk, the Bavarian premier, Markus Söder of the CSU, this summer launched a state border force and granted police far-reaching surveillance powers. He also introduced a requirement for government buildings to display crucifixes in an attempt to win back Christian supporters. But if polls prove correct, the efforts of Söder and his fellow CSU strongman, the party leader, Horst Seehofer, have spectacularly backfired.

“Seehofer and Söder have driven voters away with their right-leaning course and their anti-Merkel politics,” says Manfred Güllner, the head of the German polling agency Forsa. “The CSU was once one of the most successful major parties in Europe spanning the left, centre and the right. But now it has lost its power to unite.”

Core CSU supporters are turning away in droves, says Güllner, finding centre-right alternatives in the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and regional Free Voters. With the Social Democrats (SPD) equally tainted by repeated government crises in Berlin, the Bavarian Greens are free to challenge from the left.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Bavarian premier, Markus Söder, seen on an election poster in Munich. Photograph: Christof Stache/AFP/Getty Images

Ninety miles from Deggendorf, Georg Nitsche is handing out snacks and drinks from a green bike trailer to a group of volunteers on a Munich street corner. This unseasonably warm night will be Nitsche’s last campaigning door-to-door for the Greens before Sunday’s vote.

He too can afford to relax. His party is soaring in the polls in second place on 18%, up 10 points compared with 2013. The party’s sudden success has brought crowds of volunteers flocking to help, so many that he has overshot his door-knocking target by a third.

“The mood across Bavaria has shifted towards the Greens,” says Nitsche, 73, a retired manager who has volunteered for the party during the past three campaigns. “Five years ago, knocking on doors was a very difficult business. Now, people have nothing against saying they’re voting Green.”

Nitsche puts the surge partly down to the Greens’ young and charismatic leading candidates, Katharina Schulze and Ludwig Hartmann, both of whom have often joined him in person to canvass in Munich. But, he adds, it does not hurt that the other parties seem intent on tearing themselves apart.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Annalena Baerbock, the co-leader of the German Greens, attends an election campaign event in Schweinfurt. Photograph: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images

“The other parties are doing everything they can to help us,” says Nitsche, in between climbing stairwells in blocks of flats in his bid to persuade undecided voters in Munich’s student-heavy Schwabing district. “They’ve been constantly making mistakes for months now.”

“The CSU has alienated a lot of voters by fishing for votes on the right,” agrees Nitsche’s fellow campaigner Maria Wissmiller, a spokesperson for the Greens’ Munich office. “They misunderstood. Bavarians might be conservative, but they aren’t far right.”

And it seems that miscalculation will cost the CSU on Sunday. What remains to seen is how badly. The result will be watched carefully in Berlin. If the CSU implodes, the aftershocks could further destabilise Merkel’s government, and spell the political end of Söder and Seehofer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ludwig Hartmann and Katharina Schulze are two of the leading candidates for the Greens. Photograph: Tobias Hase/AFP/Getty Images

For all the dire predictions, Moser, the Deggendorf mayor, insists this is not the end of the CSU’s dominance in Bavaria, more a blip caused by national instability. He is hoping the shock will force his party to take note of the signal voters are about to send them.

“The punch may land a little bit deeper in the pit of the stomach this time,” says Moser. “But then it’s down to the CSU to carry out the renewal. We have to finally end the fight between [Seehofer and Söder], these two powerful squabblers.”