Berlin (AFP)
The German extreme right could arrive Sunday for the first time at the head of a major election in Germany, during regional polls in the former GDR that are held 30 years after the fall of the Wall.
And this vote may weaken a little more the coalition of Angela Merkel.
In Brandenburg, the Land surrounding Berlin, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is in the lead with 21% of voting intentions, elbow-to-elbow with the Social Democratic Party, which today holds the levers in a coalition of the left.
In Saxony, the other region called to the polls Sunday, the AfD, created in 2013, is short of the Chancellor's conservatives in polls.
But with 25%, against 29% expected for the CDU, of which Saxony is a stronghold, the populist formation would gain more than 15 points compared to the last election in 2014.
The European elections had already been a warning shot for the traditional parties, with the AfD leading in these two Länder. A third regional election will be held in Thuringia, another region of the former East Germany, on 27 October.
- Risk of paralysis -
The established parties, in particular the CDU, have already warned that they would not form a local coalition with the AfD, which is led in these regions by supporters of the party's most radical movement. This risk, even if successful at the ballot box, to block the road of power to the party.
But the political landscape should be a little more messy.
These Länder, which have important prerogatives in the German system of education or security, could be ruled by wide heteroclite alliances of right and left or even, in Saxony, by a minority coalition on the right.
And at the risk of paralyzing political action and stir up a little more discontent.
How to explain, 30 years after the fall of the Wall, the "dark mood" of these regions, in the words of Matthias Platzeck, president of the Commission 30 years of German unity?
"The collapse after 1990, the financial crisis in 2008 and the refugee crisis in 2015, all in one generation", he summarizes.
In regions where doctors, teachers and especially young people emigrate every year to the richer West of Germany, where wages remain lower, the Germans of the former GDR have "lost confidence in social justice", summed up Thomas Kliche, a political psychologist at the University of Magdeburg-Stendal.
Since 2015, Angela Merkel's refugee policy has hit a section of the population who felt that the state was more concerned with migrants than with their fate.
- "Storm" -
The AfD has made its honey out of these fears and is campaigning against traditional parties that it likens to the former Communist Party of the GDR, not hesitating to repeat slogans sung by the protesters of 1989, "We are the people "or" Complete the overthrow "of the regime.
If they are only regional elections, they will have the value of full-scale test for the Chancellor, who led since last year a fragile coalition with the Social Democrats of the SPD and who has already announced that she would be leaving power in the fall of 2021.
Both elections could provoke a "storm" within the coalition, according to Spiegel.
The SPD is in a worse situation. Training without a leader for four months and losing in the polls, he risks losing Brandenburg and making a single-digit score in Saxony.
What revive internal debates on the opportunity to remain a member of the ruling coalition by paying the price of unpopularity.
© 2019 AFP