Germany’s old order crumbles in Bavaria

ROTH, Germany — Michaela Wild believes it’s time for a change.

Standing behind the counter of the café where she works in this small town in northern Bavaria, the 48-year-old barista said she’s tired of the economic malaise that has gripped her area.

Local stores had shut down or left town of late, and cutbacks at a nearby air force base hadn’t helped local business. Wild had a sense perhaps her area’s best economic days were behind it.

This was one reason, she said, she and many people had just about had enough of mainstream parties, including the Christian Social Union (CSU), the conservative party that has ruled Bavaria — but for a relatively short interruption — since the end of World War II.

On Sunday, Wild and others who share her views will have a chance to voice their dissatisfaction as the states of Bavaria and Hesse hold parliamentary elections, which have become a bellwether of the national mood, at a particularly volatile moment in Germany’s history.

Wild said some people close to her would vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany. Not her. The party is “too radical,” she said. “Sometimes they remind me of Hitler.”

That’s why, she added, she would likely cast her ballot for an upstart right-wing party called the Free Voters, which is not yet widely known outside Bavaria.

In a political sense, Bavaria is, in many ways, a microcosm of the country. A new order of political arrivistes is capitalizing on a sense of gloom in order to erode support for the venerable parties that have long dominated the electoral landscape.

Germany’s economy is experiencing a prolonged stagnation, driven in great part by the surge in energy costs that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers entering the country has also fueled dissatisfaction; 79 percent of Germans are not satisfied with the national coalition government, according to a recent survey.

It’s against this backdrop that parties like the AfD and the Free Voters have been able to rise, splintering Germany’s political landscape and making the task of forming coalition governments in the country more difficult.

Bavaria’s CSU, led by the state’s premier, Markus Söder, is expected to notch a comfortable win on Sunday, with polls showing the party currently at 36 percent. By contemporary standards, that’s a strong performance.

But it’s also close to being the CSU’s worst-ever result. That’s largely because the AfD and the Free Voters will, taken together, win a combined 30 percent of the vote in the state.

The CSU, is, in many ways, a relic of a time in which deeply entrenched Volksparteien, or people’s parties, comfortably ruled the land.

So as Söder and his CSU partners celebrate on Sunday night, what onlookers will really be witnessing is the next chapter in a story of steady decline.

One-party state no more

The CSU, a more-conservative sister party to the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was once so popular some Bavarians joked they lived in a one-party state along the lines of North Korea.

For decades, the CSU regularly won a majority of the vote in state elections, meaning the party could rule Bavaria without any coalition partners.

Söder, one of the country’s most popular politicians, sought to justify the CSU’s long decline in polls by arguing larger forces beyond his control are at play. Last week, he told German magazine Der Spiegel Germany’s political landscape is “more and more splintered and fragmented.”

Söder was forced to enter a ruling coalition with the Free Voters after the last election in Bavaria in 2018, when his CSU scored its worst outcome since 1950, with 37.2 percent.

The Free Voters are led by Hubert Aiwanger, a populist conservative and farmer by training who was recently at the center of a scandal in which he was accused of writing an antisemitic flyer while a student in high school.

Instead of the scandal hurting Aiwanger and his party, it appeared to have helped them. Many conservatives felt the mainstream press unfairly targeted the politician and Aiwanger portrayed himself as having been the target of a smear campaign. Following the scandal, the Free Voters rose in polls.

Now, the party seeks to expand nationally and they may have some success.

In the state of Hesse, the party has risen to 4 percent in polls, just shy of the 5 percent hurdle necessary for the party to make it into the state parliament. (The party has already crossed that hurdle in the state parliament of Rhineland-Palatine.)

But the Free Voters have national ambitions, too.

“Our goal to get into the Bundestag in 2025,” Engin Eroglu, the Free Voters lead candidate in Hesse and the party’s national deputy chairman, told POLITICO. “We are making progress. We are growing from election to election.”

In Hesse, the CDU is benefitting from dissatisfaction with the federal coalition government ­­— which consists of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats, the Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats ­­— and is expected to come away with a clear win.

But the bigger story in Hesse may be who will win second place. The AfD, which stands at 16 percent in polls in the state, is competing with the Greens and the SPD for that position.

Altogether, seven parties are vying to get into the parliament in Hesse, illustrating Germany’s increasingly fractured political reality.

As he fights to maintain what’s left of the CSU’s Bavarian empire, Söder seems all too aware of that reality.

In a packed beer hall in the Bavarian city of Nürnberg on Wednesday night, Söder appealed to the crowd to stick to the political center, despite the country’s recent difficulties.

“It’s serious,” he said. “This is not the time to lend votes to other parties.”

The “bigger the crisis,” he went on, “the stronger the leadership has to be to get the country through it.”