Elections of the weekend: Bavaria, Hesse

Posting this a bit early because I don’t know how much time to post and internet access I’ll have this weekend. (I chose the Hessian flag for the post because the Bavarian flag is pretty lame.) While not national elections, two regional elections in Germany on Sunday, in Bavaria and Hesse, are worth keeping a worried eye on, if only because, as John Kampfner puts it, they serve to herald Germany’s near future of political turmoil:

Bavarian politics has been dominated by the CSU, and much of that time by one man: Franz Josef Strauss. A major player across German politics, in 1956, Strauss declared: “No legitimate political party can be to the right of the CSU.” This had a double meaning: Germany cannot countenance extremism, and the CSU (and the CDU) must do whatever it takes to absorb those who might contemplate voting for the fringes.

Now, in Bavaria and all over Germany, this has been shattered. A number of groups to the right of the established parties (and one on the left) are threatening the consensus on which the Federal Republic was built. The danger is most acute in the former communist East Germany, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is running rampant. Elections scheduled in three of the eastern Länder (regions) in a year’s time could see the AfD emerge as the largest party there. This wider trend is likely to be amplified across the continent before that  during the June 2024 elections to the European Parliament, which are expected to see a surge in extremist parties.

Both Lander are on the conservative side, but not necessarily on the extremist/anti-system side. The CDU (CSU in Bavaria) is expected to win comfortably in both cases. However, the AfD’s performance warrants considerable attention. Recent polling has been quite stable in both Hesse and Bavaria; AfD is at 14% in Bavaria (from 10% last election) and 16% in Hesse (from 13% in the last election). In both cases AfD is polling in 4th place, but terrifyingly close to 2nd place. (2nd and 3rd are Social Democrats and the Greens in Hesse, and the Greens and Free Voters of Bavaria (a vaguely populist center-right party) in Bavaria, where the Social Democrats find themselves in a distant 5th place). An AfD underperformance would be most welcome, while an AfD overperformance, particularly one that gets them into second place, would serve as a grim portent for the near future of German politics.

Update: great comment from valued commenter and electoral systems-knower Gregor Samsa on (what he takes to be) the distinctive virtues of Bavaria’s electoral system.