On February 23, the 61 million German voters renewed their parliament in an election marked by a record-breaking 82.5% turnout. Can the results remind us of the crisis in France, despite the significant differences in the political stories and cultures of the two countries?
To answer this question, we need to focus on one of the main features of the election outcome on February 23: the defeat of the two traditional “people’s parties”. The Social Democrats’ defeat is undeniable and abysmal. With 16.4% of the vote, the SPD has achieved its lowest result in its more than a hundred-year history. The incumbent Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who led the election campaign, has recognized the magnitude of the catastrophe.
However, the conservatives of CDU/CSU also suffer a severe setback: their result of 28.5% is, with the exception of the previous election in 2021, the lowest they have ever achieved since 1950. This unflattering result was overshadowed by the fact that the conservatives are at the top and their leader, Friedrich Merz, is likely to become the next Chancellor.
Commentators have described this election outcome as “disappointing”, especially in comparison to the 30% that seemed a reasonable election campaign goal. Disappointing? That’s still understated. Considering only the CDU, without its Bavarian sister party CSU, the party reached 40% of the vote in 1957; until 1994, it never fell below 35% and fluctuated between 27 and 30% from that date to 2017. Today, it has to be content with 22.6% of the vote.
This decline of the two “big” parties is no surprise. It confirms and extends a trend that began in 1983 and has been particularly pronounced since 2002 (except for 2013): the total number of votes for the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats has been steadily decreasing. In 1972, the two families combined for more than 80% of the electorate. Twenty years later, the total was still around 68%. Today, it is below 45%.
The emerging “Grand Coalition” will in reality continue to shrink, until it represents only a minority of the voters under the system. This development can be explained by the rise of the AfD, but also by other parties.
The AfD is often described by commentators as right-wing extremist. One can argue about the accuracy of this assessment, but one thing is certain, regardless of what one thinks of this movement: the great majority of its voters are not driven by a longing for the Third Reich, but rather want to express their rejection of the “system”.
This “system rejection” is not a uniquely German phenomenon. In France, it is mainly – but not exclusively – the Rassemblement National that profits from it. And even the two former major political forces must bear losses. In the parliamentary elections of 1981, the Socialist Party received 36% of the vote and the RPR (right) 21%. Forty years later, the candidates of the heirs of these parties received 1.7% and 4.7% of the vote, respectively, in the presidential elections of 2022.
And if the French National Assembly is today so divided – and a majority is impossible –, then that is the consequence of the massive refusal of the voters to follow the “classic” political forces. They have had it up to here, as the saying goes and this is something that can be observed in many other states of the European Union, too and that makes it difficult to form majorities.
Italy is an example, where the 2009-founded Five-Star Movement, which was initially a joke, achieved an astronomical result of 32.7% in 2018. This party, which had no connection to the extreme right, eventually experienced many ups and downs, but the voters wanted to continue “antisystemically” voting (or at least believed they did) by electing Giorgia Meloni, who originally came from a post-fascist mini-party, to power.
In each of these cases, the important point of analysis is not the reliability or sincerity (often questionable) of the forces often described as “populist”, but the reasons that drive citizens to express their anger in this way. One of the most important of these is the – fully justified – feeling that the alternation (or coalition) between “reasonable” parties (what the French liberal intellectual Alain Minc called “the circle of reason!”) does not fulfill their aspirations and does not change or even worsens their problems.
The lived experience is thus this: we are asked for our vote, we vote and nothing changes. As long as this situation persists, the parties described as antisystemic will have a good future and the ruling castes will have more and more trouble stabilizing their rule.
The problem is that the European integration has been particularly designed to separate the will of the voters from the sphere of political decisions. In the EU, the rules and mechanisms provide that this remains within a certain framework. The citizens can be called to the polls, they can replace the rulers if they wish, but these will meet again in the European Council, whose decisions are binding for all member states, regardless of the election outcomes.
And the Commission, the conductor, must, according to the treaties, be “independent” of national pressure, i.e., of the will of the peoples.
A system that particularly suits Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz: both men have spent a significant part of their careers in the financial sector, a milieu that is not known for its love of democracy and is therefore very pro-EU.