For much of its postwar history Germany has stood as an island of economic and political stability amid Europe’s perennially stormy waters. But the recent European Parliament elections showed that this is no longer the case. Even though confidence in mainstream parties—namely the center-left SPD and center-right CDU/CSU alliance—has been declining for years, the June 2024 European elections saw the biggest collapse of the political mainstream so far. Not only did the two major parties between them gain less than 45 percent of the votes—down from 70 percent just 20 years ago—but the right-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party overtook the SPD for the first time, becoming the country’s second-largest party after the CDU/CSU alliance.
The geographic distribution of the results was even more astounding: In all five eastern states, or Länder, the AfD came in first, with the government coalition hovering around the 10 percent mark across large parts of the region, while the CDU/CSU won in all the remaining western Länder, neatly dividing the country in two along the former border between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), popularly known as “West Germany,” and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), then “East Germany.” The left-populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) also did very well in the East, but not in the West. In other words, if West Germans are signaling a growing dissatisfaction with the current red-yellow-green “traffic light coalition” (a reference to the red, yellow, and green colors of its constituent parties) while still remaining within the bounds of mainstream politics, East Germans are revolting against the political establishment itself.