A commentary on the results of the elections to the “European Parliament” in Germany
We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an analysis by Dem Volke Dienen:
The result of the elections to the European Parliament in 2024 looks like the following for the Federal Republic of Germany (of course, it should be noted that these statistics are bourgeois ones):
| Party | percentage | |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 2019 | |
| CDU | 23,7 % | 22,6% |
| AfD | 15,9 % | 11,0 % |
| SPD | 13,9 % | 15,8 % |
| GRÜNE | 11,9 % | 20,5 % |
| CSU | 6,3 % | 6,3 % |
| BSW | 6,2 % | – |
| FDP | 5,2 % | 5,4 % |
| DIE LINKE | 2,7 % | 5,5 % |
| FREIE WÄHLER | 2,7 % | 2,2 % |
| Volt | 2,6 % | 0,7 % |
| Die PARTEI | 1,9 % | 2,4 % |
| Tierschutzpartei | 1,4 % | 1,4 % |
| Turnout | 64,8% | 61,4% |
The Union parties, the CDU and CSU, together account for 30 percent of the votes cast and, with slight gains of around one percent, are becoming the strongest of the parties that participated. The three parties that currently form the federal government coalition receive about the same number (31 percent) of votes combined. They have to accept losses of around 10 percent compared to the European election in 2019. Taking these two main aspects into account, it can be stated that there is a very great dissatisfaction with the current federal government, but the “stability” is preserved.
Ursula von der Leyen of the CDU and former, and most likely future, President of the European Commission, accordingly stated in her opinion on the election results: “Today is a good day for the European People’s Party. We won the European elections. We are by far the strongest party. We are the anchor of stability and voters have recognized our leadership over the past five years.”
Manfred Weber, CSU, who continues to be party and group chairman of the European People’s Party, which remains the largest group in the European Parliament, said on Deutschlandfunk that the German-led EPP is the party of the center and its course has been confirmed, even described it as a bulwark against the “right-wing radicals”. He said: “This Europe is our Europe, built by Adenauer …, Helmut Kohl introduced the euro. We have created it piece by piece, today’s Europe.“
So, German imperialism has managed to maintain a relative stability in this respect for the enforcement of its interests through the European Parliament.
The turnout of almost 65 percent in Germany is far more than 10 percentage points above the average within the European Union and is one of the highest turnout ever in a European election in Germany. Even if the proportion of those who refused to vote is the largest in comparison to the parliamentary parties each, at around 35 percent, this success corresponds to the interests of German imperialism and is the result of a very large mobilization from all sides of the bourgeois-parliamentary party spectrum in Germany.
Two basic election mobilization strategies can be identified. The course “against fascism” was pursued by the government and its supporters. The AfD and its equivalents in the other EU countries were identified as the main danger and dystopian scenarios were outlined accordingly.
Of the relevant opposition parties – there are currently only two who can claim this attribution for themselves, since all the others are part of a large bourgeois unity government because of federalism in the form of cooperation between the Bundestag and the Bundesrat – the AfD and the BSW, the election campaign “against war and crisis” was staged.
Accordingly, those parties that have been able to achieve the greatest successes in the new mobilization of voters are the AfD and the BSW, which have most hypocritically advocated for “peace”. The vast majority of the losses had to be recorded by the party that was portrayed above all (and not entirely wrongly) as warmongers – the Greens.
If you look at the young and first–time voters – the voting age has been lowered to 16 in Germany – then it can quickly be seen that a little over a third have voted for some “small parties”, those who do not belong to the “establishment”. Another 16 per cent voted for the AfD, and 6 percent for the BSW. So 50 per cent of the youth and young adults who have gone to vote have chosen parties that are not involved in any form in any governments.
For the most part, those who have gone to vote and have classified themselves in the “workers” category during surveys have voted for the AfD. With 33 percent, the AfD is the party with the most labor votes, ahead of the CDU in 2nd place. Thus, the AfD reaches almost three times as many workers as the SPD did in this election.
However, these results are not yet the result of a real change in the question of the bourgeois Workers’ Party, which imperialism, especially the German one, absolutely needs. The Sarah Wagenknecht alliance is about to challenge the SPD for this function as a bourgeois workers’ Party. However, something will really change on this issue only when there is a force that can seriously challenge the SPD’s control over the trade unions, as the basis for being able to be a “Workers’ Party”.
At the same time as the elections to the “European Parliament”, local elections were also held in the FRG. “Blue wave in the East” was the headline of the bourgeois press. This is particularly evident in Saxony. There the AfD won all the electoral-circles, including those in the cities of Dresden and Leipzig:
The same applies to Brandenburg, where the AfD got around 26 percent of the vote at the district and city councils and of the independent cities. The CDU reached almost 20 percent, the SPD became the third strongest force with almost 17 percent. Compared to the 2019 local elections, the AfD was able to increase by almost 10 percentage points.
In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD reached almost 26 percent of the votes cast – a doubling compared to the previous local elections. In the event of slight losses, the CDU landed in second place with about 24 percent.
In Saxony Anhalt there was around 28 percent for the AfD, the CDU reached almost 27 percent. The AfD was able to increase its result by almost 12 percentage points compared to the 2019 election. In Thuringia, too, the AfD was able to win massively, but was defeated by the CDU.
These election results show and confirm the tendency that the other parties will have to negotiate with the AfD at the local level. As a result, the AfD will be legitimized more and more as part of the system. On the election evening, the SPD leader Lars Klingbeil had called AfD leader Alice Weidel and her party “Nazis” and Klingbeil later reaffirmed this statement again: “Whoever is deliberately involved and says: ‘I want to take on responsibility’ is of course a right-wing extremist, a Nazi.” This reaction of the SPD party chairman shows again how hard the struggle for the SPD is to keep the CDU away from the AfD. In his original statement – “I also believe that the result of the European elections shakes many people again that the Nazis have become stronger in this choice” – this aspect was even more in the foreground.
A central problem of German imperialism is that indeed a strong bourgeois workers’ party is missing. In the sense of the role that social democracy played in history. Social democracy basically keeps control of the large unions, but the basis of the SPD in the workers wanes more and more. The German Social Democrats have always been, after “the division of socialism”, a party of employees, small bureaucrats, etc., in the sense of a “People’s Party”, but they always had a workers’ base. This workers’ base of social democracy is getting smaller. Nowadays you can say that the largest workers’ party is the AfD. i.e. a fascist movement. This problem leads to a contradiction with German industry, the German financial capital, which needs foreigners. The estimated amount of how much immigration German imperialism needs is at least 400,000 foreign workers per year. Today there is a deficiency of around 1,500,000 foreign workers for German imperialism.
Merkel’s policy “We can do it!”, which she became so famous for, was in the interest of the German imperialists to get foreign workers into the country, that had nothing to do with humanism. The numbers of immigration make it very clear again, as is the case of the demands of the German finance capital, which is still made today:
2014: + 550,000
2015: + 1,140,000
2016: + 499,944
2017: + 416,080
Accordingly, the AfD is against the interest of German industry. In the present state, the AfD cannot meet the interests of German imperialism for a simple economic basis. The demagogy, the restrictions, control, everything that is brought forward and the whole repression, which is increasingly developed, is the role that the AfD fulfills. But the AfD will not take over the government in Germany in the near future and if so, then they would have to do a completely different policy than it propagates it today. Accordingly, it will also be difficult for the AfD to keep its recent influence on the worker, the part of the workers that they can now lead.
If the growing fascism in Germany contradicts financial capital, how does it explain that the bourgeois parties and media are increasingly adapting fascism?
The AfD plays a role. It serves the bourgeoisie as justification to drive a general reactionaryzation of the state. The difference between the rhetoric of the AfD and the actual policy of the CDU and the SPD is that the CDU and the SPD will participate in the rushing against the foreigners, but they will never make big deportations. What the planning is, is to suppress the foreign workers in the country even more in order to split the working class even more here, in order to neutralize the working class as force. At the same time, they want to enforce the direct colonial exploitation of foreign workers, as it happens today, e.g. in Bremen with the Mexican nurses, or in Bremerhaven with the Spanish teachers. The same development takes place in many other federal States.
They will also continue the politics that they have operated with the Ukrainians, compared to the Syrian migrants. Their credo is: “We choose the migrants we want. We don’t want that many Muslims, we want white, we do not want to import workers from Muslim countries accordingly, but above all from European countries. If there are not enough white people, then we want yellow people, because yellow people are better than black people.” This is, so to speak, the racial Herrenmenschen-logic they apply. This is the tendency that they drive forward. They want to split the working class, but do not want to prevent migration as such, in contrast to what the AfD promises.
The function of these Parties is also the same in other countries. We see the same phenomenon in Norway, where the name is “Progress Party” party (Fremskrittspartiet (FRP)), in Sweden, in the so-called “Swedish Democrats” (Sverigedemokraterna (SD)). It is the same development that is now absorbed in Finland, with the development of the so-called “true Finns” (Perussuomalaiset (PS or PeruS)1 etc. etc. In the Nordic countries of Europe, this effect has gone much further, many things have been already completely adopted by the parties that are comparable to the AfD.
The CDU is very “democratic” in comparison, e.g. to the conservative party in Sweden. In Denmark, the Social Democrats operate an open racist policy without someone considering this strange. So it is unlikely that the AfD will fulfill a different function. Unless the AfD would adapt their policy if they were coming to the government or would become part of a coalition – which will not happen at the moment (or the next election). Above all, the AfD is demagogy that tries to channel the anger of the working class, the anger of the masses, not only for the harmless but good direction by further splitting the working class. Therefore, there is no contradiction in the sense at this point.
The function of the AfD is not to make Germany fascist by taking power, dissolving the parliament and holding congresses in Nuremberg. Rather, it is to promote the reactionaryzation of the entire society and the division of the working class. That is their political function within this country.
The Left Party, which was a social democratic party (a bit exaggerated, but basically correct, could be said: an American, postmodernist hippie pile) takes care of anything but workers’ policy. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the idea that the Left Party will be the new large workers’ party in Germany is not realistic.
It is this situation in which we have to look at the Wagenknecht Party (BSW). German imperialism needs as a social support, as a social security against the growing struggle in the mass movement of the working class a force that catches this power of the workers. To do this, you need a strong bourgeois workers’ party. The program of Wagenknecht and the BSW, everything they express, in the question of “immigration”, is agitation against foreigners and imperialist chauvinism in plain language, very, very similar, that of the Social Democrats, e.g. in Denmark. The current Social Democratic Danish Minister of State, as the Prime Minister is called there, issued a proposal a few years ago that all criminal foreigners – and all criminal foreigners in Denmark also means the “second and third generation foreigners”, that is, people who were born by foreign parents or grandparents in Denmark, which would be called citizens in other countries (but in Denmark they are called “foreigners”) – should be sent to small islands, where special prisons would be built, where these foreigners should serve their time. In Germany you know that, concentration camp it is called.
Today’s Prime Minister of Denmark has made this proposal. She is a social democrat. Today, among this social democratic government, there is what is called the “Ghetto Act” in Denmark. This means that people can be resettled at the state’s command, so that people with a “non-western background” do not live in too high concentration in certain areas. Explicitly the “not western”. That sounds like pure Nazi doctrine, but is the policy of the social democratic government of Denmark these days.
Sarah Wagenknecht and her party want to play the same role in Germany as the Danish Social Democrats. That is the specific situation. The rest of the economic program of Wagenknecht is just a traditional state capitalism and social reform. What is tried with the Wagenknecht party is the role that social democracy can no longer fulfill to fill this political space. Accordingly, these must be combated in this way: The criticism of the Wagenknecht party must be that they are Social Democrats are, Social Democrats, who have always revealed the interest of the working class, that they are nothing that is in any kind of something original.
The masses in Germany are in motion. The elections serve the purpose of the state to direct this movement to a legal framework. They serve to channel the anger of the working class, the youth and the broad masses, neutralize, into illusions in bourgeois democracy. The fascist forces are not against it, on the contrary, they remained loyal to Mussolini’s slogan “Everything through the State. Nothing against the State”. Accordingly, there are two ways in the development of the movement of the masses that are becoming increasingly clear:
One way is the path of the bourgeoisie, the path of the state, the path of imperialism, which is to keep the anger of the masses in legal, parliamentary barriers in order to lead them to defeat. All revisionists and opportunists who do not want to carry out the consistent break with legalism and parliamentarianism, who do not want to break with the “left” electoral associations, such as “Die Linke” and the “BSW”, serve to develop this path.
The other way, the path of the proletariat, which spreads the anger of the masses, spurs and raises it and does everything to channel their justified rebellion against the class enemy, in the service of the perspective of the socialist revolution. He breaks with every bourgeois “respectability”, with the legalism and any form of illusions in parliamentarianism. It is the relentless and bitter struggle against revisionism and opportunism of all kinds and against all the false “workers’ leaders”. Each honorary revolutionary in this country must know what way to follow.
1Now just named “The Finns”.
