Lessons from the Lower Saxony election
Disaster for the FDP, gift for the AfD
By Frauke Niemeyer and Hubertus Volmer
10/10/2022 5:52 am
The SPD has lost percentage points and is still the glorious winner of the election Sunday. For the FDP, the performance is a catastrophe that either escalates into a traffic light crisis – or complains about a few successes in Berlin for the liberals. And the AfD can look forward to a gift. The lessons of yesterday’s election night.
SPD can be happy that she had the office bonus
For the SPD, things went more than lightly: they lost more than the FDP. But more than 33 percent is a respectable result these days, especially when the federal party is below the 20 percent mark in the nationwide polls. Above all, however, she will continue to provide the prime minister. As the elections in May in the neighboring states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein in Lower Saxony showed: a moderately popular prime minister can count on being re-elected.
Stephan Weil worked hard to earn this victory. He not only campaigned in Lower Saxony, but also in Berlin, in a way against his party colleague Olaf Scholz. Because if Weil had had his way, the concept for a gas price brake would not be presented this Monday – it would have existed for a long time. It is hardly his fault that Weil was unable to do this; that goes to the account of the traffic light. What he has apparently achieved: Many voters believe that he takes their existential concerns seriously and wants to remedy the situation. “Our state and our democracy are facing the greatest test I can remember,” he said during the election campaign. “We have to prove that we deserve people’s trust.” Apparently that worked out.
The CDU is still in bad shape
Internally, the Christian Democrats said weeks before the election Sunday that they had nothing to lose in Hanover and could only win. Conceivably low expectations in view of Prime Minister Weil’s office bonus, whose popularity rating CDU challenger Bernd Althusmann never approached. However: The competitive position of the CDU should not have been that difficult.
According to associations, medium-sized companies, which are well represented in Lower Saxony, do not feel that they are sufficiently supported by the traffic light, and in many cases even fear for their existence. And according to surveys, the majority of private individuals are also not convinced that effective ways out of the crisis can be found in Berlin. But the dissatisfaction at the federal level can only be used to a limited extent if the opponent, SPD man Weil, criticizes the federal government just as loudly as the CDU wanted to do. Then the criticism quickly comes to nothing and, in the worst case, reveals that the CDU opposition in the federal government has little concrete to offer. Friedrich Merz, as head of the federal party, must take away from this election that the government’s mistakes do not automatically mean support for the opposition, that Twitter is not its medium, and that 28 percent of approval in the polls only look like a lot when compared to the a catastrophic 18 percent for the SPD. Measured against the 40 percent from early summer 2020, the CDU is still in a bad way.
In the absence of convincing criticisms of Weil, the CDU’s top candidate, Althusmann, often resorted to phrases or the weak argument that Weil wanted to resign after the coming term of office. Such half-baked arguments work at a CDU party conference, but not when attacking the head of government.
The FDP is at the height of its crisis
The Liberals are the losers of the evening. The result clearly stems from the dissatisfaction with the traffic light coalition in Berlin and is so blatant that Lindner, Wissing and Co. in the unpopular government alliance cannot continue as before. The Ministry of Finance, Christian Lindner’s preferred department, is proving to be an unexpected burden for the FDP – the Finance Minister only has the choice between refusing the relief packages, which inevitably acts as a brake at times when things have to be done quickly, or waving through, with which he moving further and further away from the FDP’s position of enforcing the debt brake.
The Liberals cannot assert themselves on relevant, high-profile issues such as extending the life of nuclear power plants. Visibly too little yield for the liberal clientele, which the FDP is already punishing in federal polls as well as in the fourth state election. The fact that the Free Democrats have to pay for their unfortunate role in federal politics by leaving the Lower Saxony state parliament is the temporary climax of their crisis. The only way out of that is through a more prominent profile in the Berlin coalition. Curiously, the defeat in Hanover could mean that the influence of the FDP in Berlin is increasing.
A snapshot for the Greens
If you measure the performance of the Greens in the polls in the summer, an old rule would have come true: the Greens win polls, not elections. But the last surveys before the election were only slightly better than the actual result.
In view of the widespread criticism, including from the SPD and FDP, that Economics Minister Robert Habeck has been exposed to for months because of the messed-up gas levy and the gas price brake that is still not clear in the beginning, the election result is impressive. Especially since it should be garnished with a government participation, the twelfth of the sixteen federal states. On top of that, the Greens in Lower Saxony have won direct mandates for the first time. The downside: This is just a snapshot. Since the beginning of September, the national trend has mainly been in a different direction: downwards.
The AfD can once again look forward to a gift
The then AfD leader Alexander Gauland called the refugee crisis “a gift” to which his party owes its resurgence in the first place. In fact, polls show that the AfD is not elected because of its political ideas, but because and when it pools dissatisfaction. However, Gauland was subject to a misunderstanding: The “gift” was not the refugees, but the ongoing dispute in the grand coalition and above all within the Union parties.
This pattern also explains the current upswing of the AfD, both in the nationwide surveys and in the state elections in Lower Saxony – the first since February 2020 in which the party was able to gain ground. The reason for this is not the energy crisis, but the poor performance of the traffic light when dealing with it.
Left remain on the decline
Unlike the AfD, the left cannot benefit from the traffic light disputes. She undercut her poor result from 2017. This was the ninth consecutive election in which the left suffered losses. As long as the quarrels between the groups in the party continue, this trend is unlikely to change. The AfD is now organizing the “hot autumn” that the left announced and garnished with all sorts of understanding of Russia.