Here is my video commentary on the elections
A guest contribution by Vera Lengsfeld
Sunday’s Hesse election has some clear and some supposedly clear messages. Here are my conclusions:
A
The one-and-only loser is the left-wing Ampel-Merkel center – Green-Red loses almost 10 points, FDP and Left still together almost six. Overall, a whopping 15.5 points lost – election winner CDU (34.5 percent) plus runner-up AfD 18.4 percent together have a comfortable blockade majority – beyond these two conservative forces there is no majority in Hesse.
If Boris Rhein continues to support Merkel-Ampel policies in the state or in the federal government, be it in migration, internal security or energy and “climate”, then he is governing against the declared majority in his country.
B
The traffic light in personification of Nancy Faeser is the big loser in Hesse. Nancy Faeser is the personification of the attempt to simply continue Merkel’s policies with other means and people – but the policy approach of moderated, controlled migration while maintaining the appearance of open borders has failed just as thoroughly as the attempt to combine a senseless “decarbonization” with an unnecessary phase-out of nuclear power and the ineffectual attempt (“Germany must lead the way”) to give it a historical charge and sell it as saving the world.
If Nancy Faeser had any remnant of political-personal stature, she would draw a line under this disaster herself and resign from all positions.
And what applies to individuals is even clearer in the case of parties: the FDP has just managed to get into the Hesse state parliament – after all, the FDP’s top candidate in Hesse has also taken a very clear anti-traffic light course: Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the signal is clear: If the FDP does not withdraw from this traffic light or clearly wrest the industrial policy lead from the Greens, the FDP will not enter the 21st German Bundestag and will thus be the second established party to disappear from the German political landscape in the fall of 2025.
C
The existing parties, and I now include the AfD, should stop telling themselves that people vote for them because they are good or typical of the country or have a great top candidate. Voters in Hesse have also made the most of what is available. Still, it was only a choice of the lesser of two evils.
There was no convincing offer of a new professional force between the CDU and the AfD in the bourgeois-conservative camp – the Free Voters are currently convincing outside of Bavaria only as a local electoral alliance in Brandenburg (and the newly founded Alliance Germany is not such a new offer – they did not even compete in Hesse).
The CDU under Boris Rhein should therefore not get too cocky about its more than 7-point gain. If a pro-citizen, pro-industry, professional liberal-conservative force had entered the race, it would certainly have been able to win 10-15 points out of the total CDU-AfD-FDP-FW score of over 60 points.
D
It is incomprehensible to me why the CDU and Boris Rhein are still performing an exploratory charade – the Greens in Hesse have already taken a pragmatic course under Tarek Al-Wazir – Black-Green has been confirmed and can and should continue to govern undogmatically under clear remembrance of the conditions listed under A. It would be counterproductive to give Nancy Faeser, who lost the election so badly, an additional boost by holding exploratory talks.
My current video
SPD leader Esken after election disaster on Anne Will: terminal loss of reality. AfD must stay outside
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Guest posts always reflect the author’s opinion, not mine. And I believe that contributions from contentious authors are particularly valuable for discussion and democracy. I value my readers as adults and want to offer them different points of view so they can form their own opinions.
Vera Lengsfeld, born in Thuringia in 1952, is a politician and publicist. She was a civil rights activist and a member of the GDR’s first freely elected Volkskammer. From 1990 to 2005, she was a member of the German Bundestag, initially until 1996 for Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, and from 1996 for the CDU. Since then she has been working as a freelance author. In 2008, she was honored with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. She runs a blog that I highly recommend. The post first appeared on Vera Lengsfeld’s blog.
Image: rarrarorro/Shutterstockmore from Vera Lengsfeld on reitschuster.de
