AOn a sunny Sunday in North Rhine-Westphalia, 44.5 percent of eligible voters preferred not to vote. And this despite the fact that the most populous federal state is sending an important signal to Berlin, although the pandemic has made the importance of state politics clear and although in the past few weeks there has been a neck-and-neck race between the two mainstream parties, the CDU and SPD, and the top candidates Hendrik Wüst and Thomas Kutschaty. It is the lowest voter turnout in North Rhine-Westphalia since the end of the Second World War. Does the country represent a trend throughout Germany?
Since the mid-2010s, voter turnout in state elections has risen from North to South and West to East after decades of falling on average. This clearly went hand in hand with the rise of the AfD. The party benefited greatly from the migration issue and the resentment of some citizens at the high number of refugees admitted. Between the beginning of 2016 and the beginning of 2020, 16 state parliaments were elected in the Federal Republic. Voter turnout rose 15 times and fell only once, in Hesse. There, however, mobilization in the previous election was relatively easy because it coincided with a federal election.
State election North Rhine-Westphalia 2022
all results
Voter turnout has been falling again for two years, basically since the beginning of the pandemic. North Rhine-Westphalia was the eighth state election since then, voter turnout fell six times and only rose twice, but only because the Bundestag was elected on the same day in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin. Apart from that, the election in Hamburg in February 2020 (when Corona hardly played a role in this country) was the last vote in which turnout increased. Not only was the election a turning point in this respect, it was also the first ever in which the AfD suffered losses. Since then, the party has been on the wane, both at federal and state level.
Even the SPD could not mobilize
Election researcher Thorsten Faas from Freie Universität Berlin says: “In the meantime, the AfD has been very successful in turning dissatisfaction into votes for the AfD instead of non-election. ‘No voting and protest voting – two sides of the same coin’, that’s what a colleague once put it. However, the AfD is nowhere near as successful in doing this as it was a few years ago.” In fact, the AfD also lost most of the votes in NRW to the non-voter camp. All in all, says Faas, too little is known about non-voters because they do not take part in post-election polls. As a result, their motives remained too much in the dark. “This is a serious problem,” says the political scientist. In principle, however, it is known that “non-election is often a first way” to “express dissatisfaction – which often affects government parties”.
If the non-voters were not excluded from the election result, the CDU would only get 19.7 percent, the SPD 14.7 percent, the Greens 10 percent, the FDP 3.2 percent and the AfD 3.0 percent. The “party of non-voters”, says Faas, just doesn’t exist. Too different are those who do not cast their vote. But one could say that left-wing parties depend on a high level of mobilization. In North Rhine-Westphalia not only did the AfD lose votes to the non-voter camp, but also the SPD to a considerable extent.