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The AfD’s advances are a sharp rebuke of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government and a sign of political change across the continent.
By Sarah Maslin Nir and Christopher F. Schuetze
Report from Berlin
The right-wing Alternative for Germany won a record number of votes in Sunday’s European Parliament elections, in a sharp complaint from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition in Germany and a sign of the political shift to the right across the continent.
The party, known as the AfD, won 16% of the vote, beating Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats, who won 30%. The AfD won almost five percent more votes than in the 2019 elections and attracted more voters than everyone else. This was the AfD’s most successful performance in a national election, and came as Scholz has reached record levels of popularity in the country, according to polls.
On Monday, Alice Weidel, one of the two leaders of the AfD, demanded that Scholz call new parliamentary elections, just as French President Emmanuel Macron did after his party’s dismal results. A spokesman for Scholz ruled out the option of early elections.
Describing his party’s “great success,” Weidel told a news conference in Berlin that the government opposes Germany, not Germany. “People are fed up,” he says.
The effects of elections can have far-reaching consequences. The vast European projects of a series of so-called Green Deal environmental projects may lose their appeal, and Mr Scholz has already begun to question the legitimacy of his government. UE. Si elections are confirmed, they say, this could mean that only a third of Germans their three-way governing partnership.
The AfD, once a fringe group, is under surveillance through Germany’s internal intelligence facilities on suspicion of being “extremist. “Three-quarters of Germans believe that the party is a risk to democracy. But outrage over the recent killing of a police officer in Mannheim, Germany, just days before the EU decision. The presidential election and the arrest of an Afghan immigrant suspected of having been stabbed would have possibly reignited fears capitalized on by the AfD.
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