Halving Your Own Vote Is A Verdict On You, Not On Them (Mainstream Right)

Begin with the number that is genuinely unusual, because it is not the AfD's. A governing party's vote share fell from one election to the next by roughly half, in a state it had run since 2002, to 17.2 per cent and fifteen seats. As Hugo Müller-Vogg puts it in Cicero, that "kommt so gut wie nie vor" — it almost never happens. The AfD's 43.8 per cent and thirty-nine of eighty-three seats is the shape of the space that opened. The interesting question is who opened it.

The comforting answer is that Saxony-Anhalt is small, poor and eastern, and therefore not the republic. Two million people, unemployment at 8.2 per cent against 6.5 nationally, insolvency filings up 23.9 per cent in a year against 10.3. All true, and none of it a defence. The disappointment with the old parties of government is not an eastern speciality, and a party that consoles itself with demography has already decided not to read its own returns.

A party that halves its own vote has not been unlucky. It has been answered, and the answer was about it.

Which is why the pressure to soften the Brandmauer should be resisted on grounds harder than sentiment. Mikuláš Dzurinda, who governed Slovakia in coalition with the direct successor of its Communist Party, sets out the two conditions under which a Christian democratic party can safely enter such an alliance: the radical partner must be willing to correct its positions, and the Christian democrats must be clearly the stronger. He had 26 per cent to his partner's 15, and a written pre-election agreement on EU and NATO accession. Here the ratio runs the other way, at 17.2 to 43.8, and there is no agreement about anything. "Weder Friedrich Merz noch die CDU dürfen kapitulieren," he writes — neither may capitulate.

There is also the record of what happens to the junior partner. Dzurinda's SDĽ later failed to re-enter parliament; Wolfgang Schüssel's ÖVP survived a coalition with Haider's FPÖ, but the FPÖ did not survive it in the form it entered. In both cases the reformers set the direction. Nothing in the Magdeburg arithmetic offers the CDU that. What is left is the unglamorous work: lower taxes on income and profits, spending cut where it is unproductive, a serious deterrent against Russia and a clear European commitment. That is the ground the Union used to win on, and there is no shortcut back through the party that took its voters.

The comforting reading is that Saxony-Anhalt is small, poor and eastern, and therefore not the republic. Two million people, a shrinking population, unemployment at 8.2 per cent against 6.5 nationally, corporate insolvency filings up 23.9 per cent in a year against 10.3. All of that is true and none of it is a defence. The disappointment with the old parties of government is not an eastern speciality; it is what the same voters in the north and the south say when asked, and the state simply reached the point first. A party that consoles itself with demography has already decided not to read its own returns.

A party that halves its own vote has not been unlucky. It has been answered, and the answer was about it.

Michael Sommer's warning in the same magazine is worth taking at face value rather than as rhetoric: what may be beginning is the meltdown of the German party system, and with it what the AfD's Bundestag business manager called on election night an "andere Republik". A state of two million held the attention of the country for one evening because the question on the table was not who governs Magdeburg but whether the arrangement of parties that has organised the Federal Republic still holds. That is a question about the CDU's fitness, not about the AfD's ambition, which was never in doubt.

Which is why the pressure to soften the Brandmauer should be resisted on grounds harder than sentiment. Mikuláš Dzurinda, who governed Slovakia in coalition with the direct successor of its Communist Party, sets out the two conditions under which a Christian democratic party can safely enter such an alliance: the radical partner must be willing to correct its positions, and the Christian democrats must be clearly the stronger. He had 26 per cent to his partner's 15, and a written pre-election agreement that EU and NATO accession would be the government's first purpose. Here the ratio runs the other way, at 17.2 to 43.8, and there is no agreement about anything. "Weder Friedrich Merz noch die CDU dürfen kapitulieren," he writes — neither may capitulate.

The obvious objection is that the firewall is precisely what produced 43.8 per cent, by handing the AfD the role of the only party the cartel will not talk to. It deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal. The answer is that the firewall did not write the Union's campaign, did not choose its candidate, and did not spend the summer making the Union's own personnel rather than the AfD's programme the subject of the election. Those were choices, and they were the Union's. A rule that constrains what you may do after the count cannot explain what you did before it.

There is also the record of what happens to the junior partner in these arrangements. Dzurinda's SDĽ later failed to re-enter parliament; Wolfgang Schüssel's ÖVP survived its coalition with Haider's FPÖ, though the European People's Party debated expelling it, and the FPÖ did not survive in the form it entered. In both cases the reformers set the direction and the pace, because they were stronger and had agreed the destination in advance. Nothing in the Magdeburg arithmetic offers the CDU either condition. What is left is the unglamorous work: lower taxes on income and company profits, spending cut where it is unproductive, a serious deterrent against Russia, a clear European commitment. That is the ground the Union used to win on, and there is no shortcut back to it through the party that took its voters.