German Chancellor Scholz’s coalition suffers heavy losses in European elections

By Anadolu staff

BERLIN (AA) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left liberal coalition suffered heavy losses in Sunday’s European Parliament elections, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) made significant gains.

According to the preliminary official results, Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has fallen to third place behind the main opposition conservative CDU/CSU and the far-right AfD.

The Social Democrats scored their worst-ever result in a European Parliament election, winning only 13.9% of the vote, nearly 2 percentage points below that of the last European elections five years ago.

The co-ruling Greens Party suffered the biggest losses of the night and saw its support plummet to below 12% from 20.5% in 2019. The coalition’s junior partner, the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) scored 5.2%, with a slight fall of 0.2%.

The results were widely interpreted in local media as voters' punishment of Scholz’s coalition government, which saw its popularity dive to an all-time low of 22% this month.

The main opposition Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) won the biggest share of the vote with 30%, managing to increase their vote modestly from 28.9%.

The anti-immigrant AfD scored its best-ever result in a European election, finishing second with 16% of the vote, up from 11% in the last election.

Exit polls showed that the majority of AfD voters were concerned about their economic welfare and were demanding stronger measures to stop irregular migration.

Some 95% of AfD voters said “so many foreigners were coming to Germany,” and 78% expressed their fear of “not being able to maintain their standard of living” in the future.

Meanwhile, the newly formed left-wing populist party, Bundnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), managed to win 6.2% of the vote in its first European election.

During its election campaign, the BSW sharply criticized Chancellor Scholz and coalition partners for delivering weapons to Ukraine, and called for diplomatic initiatives to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

- Distribution of seats in the European Parliament

According to the preliminary official results, the conservative CDU/CSU bloc is set to win 23 of Germany’s 96 seats at the European Parliament.

The far-right AfD, after scoring big gains in the elections, secured almost 15 seats.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats were projected to get only 14 seats.

The Greens were set to lose more than half of their seats, and take only 12, after suffering a heavy loss. The liberal FDP has been expected to get around five seats.

Popular left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht’s BSW has been projected to win six seats.

The voter turnout of 64.8% was higher than any of the previous European elections in the country over the last three decades. Germany recently lowered the voting age to 16 for the European Parliament elections to increase young people’s engagement in politics.