German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s resounding defeat in key local elections on Sunday will be as traumatic in Brussels as in Berlin. Voters dealt a sharp blow to all three parties in Scholz’s centre-left executive. The victory of conservative opposition party CDU came together with a strong showing of far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), who won 15% of the votes in the populous state of Bavaria and 18% in Hesse. Scholz’s coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and liberals was already damaged by internal squabbles. Its increased weakness could paralyse crucial reforms both in Germany and at the European Union level.
In Berlin, divisions on the pace and cost of the green transition between the Green Party and the liberal FDP, whose leader Christian Lindner is the coalition’s finance minister, have already led to a watering down of a planned boiler ban from 2024. Pollsters attribute much of the recent rise of AfD, whose focus has long been the fight against immigration, to its opposition to costly climate transition measures. If Scholz slows down Germany’s efforts towards net zero in response to the local vote, this would reverberate at EU level.
In Brussels, a German government preoccupied with its domestic travails may be unable to rally other member states around the sort of compromise proposals the EU needs to clinch some key deals. That is the case of ongoing discussions for a pan-European energy price reform, which sees France and Germany sitting far apart, and on rewriting the bloc’s fiscal rules. The EU decision process risks slowing to a halt just when it needs to accelerate. (By Pierre Briancon)
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