Germany under the shock of the success of the extreme right

Almost every meeting of Angela Merkel, he could rely on the presence of a few supporters to come and shout : "Hau ab ! "(" Casse-toi ! "). Sunday 24 September, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has certainly not managed to dethrone the chancellor. But he has reached the goal he had set for himself : getting third, behind the conservatives (CDU-CSU) and social democrats (SPD). And with a result higher than the one announced by the surveys, 12.6% of the vote. In 2013, the AfD, which had just been created, had received 4.7% of votes cast. Not enough to reach the 5% threshold necessary for a party to be represented in the Bundestag.

Not surprisingly, it is in the east of the country that the AfD has achieved its best scores. In the territories that were located in the German democratic Republic (GDR) during the cold war, he obtained, on average, 21% of the vote, which in fact in these regions the second political force behind the CDU (26 %). In Saxony, the Land where he recorded his best performance, the AfD has even slightly ahead of the party of Ms. Merkel (27 % compared with 26.9 %).

In the west of Germany, with the breakthrough of the extreme right is less. But it is still important, especially in Bavaria, where the AfD got 12.4% of the vote. In this Land, this result caused a shock. First, because it reminds us that the extreme right did not prosper and in the ex-GDR, in other words, in the part of the country where the economy is less dynamic and where democracy has less than thirty years of existence. Even a region like Bavaria, where only 3 % of the active population is unemployed, vote today to be more for the AfD than for the FDP (liberal democrats), the party of the upper middle class.