Scholz’s policies pave the way for the far right

File produced by our comrades at the newspaper Freie Plattform fur Arbeiterpolitik
(Free Platform for Workers’ Politics)

On September 1, regional elections were held in the eastern German Länder of Saxony and Thuringia, home to more than six million people.

With a rising turnout (73%), the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party came out well ahead in Thuringia (32.8%) and just behind the Christian Democrat CDU party in Saxony (30.6%).

The three parties in Chancellor Scholz’s coalition government (SPD Social Democrats, Greens and FDP Liberals), which had already been punished in the European elections on 9 June, were crushed. In Saxony, the three parties won 13.3% of the vote and in Thuringia 10.4%. The SPD, the historic party of the German working class, continued to plummet, with 6.1% in Thuringia, its worst result in the party’s 150year history! The CDU, despite its triumphalist declarations, also achieved its worst results since 1990. Die Linke (from the party of the East German bureaucracy) fell back, weakened by the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht and by its regional management of adaptation to privatisation.

The last bastion of the Scholz government is the top of the DGB trade union apparatus, which, in an internal memo, denies that this was a “vote of protest”, because, as it brazenly writes, “it was not the federal government that was in contention, nor were federal policy issues being raised”.

Yet what was punished in these elections was precisely the policy of the Scholz government. A violently antiworking class policy that continues and worsens the policy of the ‘grand coalitions’ between Merkel and the SPD. A policy of pouring billions into the war in Ukraine, at the expense

of public services. A policy of supplying arms to Israel and criminalising solidarity with the Palestinian people.

A policy supported by the leaders of the SPD and their relays at the top of the trade union apparatus, which is driving whole sections of the impoverished working-class electorate into the arms of despair and the demagogues of the far right.