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Dark political clouds are gathering on the horizon in the heart of Europe

Natale Labia
By Natale Labia
3 Sep 2024
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Finding solutions and enacting reforms to prevent Europe from going the way of the extremists will fall to the next generation of leaders.

Sunday, 1 September, brought yet another political upheaval in the heart of Europe. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition suffered a significant setback in two regional elections in eastern Germany, where populist parties on both the far right and left captured over 60% of the vote in Thuringia and nearly half in Saxony.

The openly anti-immigration, Eurosceptic and extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won a decisive victory in Thuringia with around 33% of the vote and came second to the Christian Democrats in Saxony. Although the AfD is unlikely to be able to form a government as it remains ostracised by all other parties in parliament, it marks the first win for a far-right party in a German state election since World War 2.

These results deliver a stinging and humiliating blow to Scholz and his deeply unpopular government, underscoring the challenges it faces ahead of the next national election, which is just over a year away. 

The outlook is similarly bleak for an upcoming state election in three weeks in Brandenburg – the region encircling Berlin and home to Scholz’s Potsdam constituency.

Issues are structural and topical


Germany’s economy is stagnating. The German economic model, based in no small part on imports of cheap Russian energy and exports of manufactured goods to China, is in dire need of a radical transformation and investment. It now finds itself in the strange and uncomfortable situation of being the growth laggard of Europe.

But the election campaign was also overshadowed by the 23 August terror attack in the west German town of Solingen, when a man fatally stabbed three people and injured eight others. The man, a Syrian national suspected of being a member of Isis, was arrested a day after the attack after handing himself in to police. 

Both the AfD and far-left anti-immigrant BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) seized on the incident to claim that uncontrolled immigration had led to a surge in violent crime on German streets and to demand that asylum seekers who have committed crimes be deported.

Problems in France


Yet if things east of the Rhine have not looked as unsettled for many decades, they are not much better in the west. 

In June, French President Emmanuel Macron took a gamble by calling snap parliamentary elections, aiming to “clarify” the results of the European Parliament elections, which had been won by the far right. 

However, the results of the 7 July poll have made things less clear than ever. While French voters turned out in large numbers to block the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) from gaining a majority and claiming the prime minister’s position, neither of the other two blocs – the centre nor the left – could form a governing majority, leaving the National Assembly without a clear path forward. Voters were clear about what they did not want, but they did not offer a decisive direction for what they did want.

Now there is no clear majority in parliament, a prime minister unable to withstand a vote of no confidence, and no possibility of another election for a year. It is unclear who Macron will turn to as his next prime minister who might be able to run a functional government. 

When Macron achieved a decisive victory in 2017, dismantling the traditional left and right parties, he could not have imagined that their decline would come back to thwart him seven years later. The usually ebullient President has fallen uncharacteristically silent – his country at an impasse.

A stuttering engine in need of a restart


The Franco-German engine, once a driving force for economic growth and political integration in Europe, now appears more decrepit than ever. The timing could not be worse. Europe desperately needs momentum to push through vital political and economic reforms. 

The root of the problems lies in a severe lack of productivity and economic growth; in much of the Eurozone, real wages have either declined or remained stagnant over the past five years, according to the ECB. This economic stagnation has created an environment ripe for divisive far-right rhetoric.

Europe has weathered numerous crises in the past, from the Eurozone financial crisis and the pandemic to the 2015 refugee crisis and the energy crisis following the Ukraine war. What sets the current situation apart is that it is not just one major threat but a series of political and economic challenges for which the EU’s fragmented and complex political system seems poorly equipped to handle. 

For liberals and social democrats, the solution to all these problems is more Europe, not less. This means completing the reforms on fiscal union, capital markets union and more streamlined majority voting procedures in the European Council. For the far right, however, all of this is an anathema. They would prefer to see an illiberal “Europe of nations”.

Maybe this is all beside the point. Increasingly, it appears that finding solutions and enacting reforms to prevent Europe from going the way of the extremists will fall to the next generation of leaders after Macron and Scholz. 

Germany faces elections next year, and France will follow in 2027. 

Europeans can only hope that new leadership emerges sooner rather than later, as their citizens deserve more than the current febrile climate of hate and political stalemate. DM

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