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The normal citizen looks somewhat puzzled into the camera. The TV reporter has been looking for a long time to find anyone to talk to, it's wet and cold on this election evening and there are not too many Thuringians anyway.
But you can not and should not always just talk to politicians, you can not only get cast members for the audience talk in the studio, you have to go out sometimes, even if there is almost no one, but you have to go to citizens and citizens the street. Just listen.
What does he think of the election result, the reporter wants to know. Well, he has just learned about it, says the man. What does he think of the possibility of a minority government, the reporter asks. The man did not quite understand that. "Minimum government?"
The reporter explains it to him. He could not say anything about that, says the man. Now you just have to see what comes out of it. There is always a lot of promise before the elections, he wants to see if that will be honored.
The middle spoke
You can make fun of this simple view of politics, haha, you do not even know what a minority government is, but that would be wrong. I believe: this is where the middle spoke. And then she goes home calmly and waits for a while.
State election Thuringia 2019
Preliminary final result
Second vote result
Shares in percent
CDU
21.8
-11.7
The left
31
+2.8
SPD
8.2
-4.2
AFD
23.4
+12.8
green
5.2
-0.5
FDP
5
+2.5
other
5.4
-1.7
allocation of seats
Total: 90
Majority: 46 seats
29
8th
5
5
21
22
The Left (29)
SPD (8)
Green (5)
FDP (5)
CDU (21)
AfD (22)
Source: Provincial Returning Officer
Results in detail
Mike Mohring, the honest campaigner of the CDU, has wrestled and lost around the middle. The SPD, also a mid-party party, does not matter in Thuringia. The bourgeois FDP has its jump on the 5-percent hurdle alone thanks to the fact that five voters who might otherwise have stayed home, but have yet to vote to vote. And the Greens have apparently passed their much noticed phase as a nationwide people's party in such great speed that they brought in Thuringia now quite in line with the trend of other former people's parties, not a leg on the ground. "Left and right-wing populists smash middle-class," analyzes the "Bild" newspaper.
That sounds as if something had disappeared, as if the vast majority of voters had simply dissolved in the air. In fact, they are still there, the turnout has increased, so it has even become more. The middle is not gone. She is now only elsewhere.
What used to be the edge is today the center in Thuringia. And the functionaries of the former center parties stand on the edge and watch.
photo gallery
14 pictures
The election evening in Thuringia: a bit of cheers and a lot of helplessnessRight-wing extremist chosen out of conviction
From the left Bodo Ramelow has destroyed the SPD. Like Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Wurttemberg, he acted as a non-party state patriarch so social-democratic that hardly anyone found the true Social Democrats still necessary. The Ramelow Left is an SPD with a different label, a harmless left that wants nothing more than a more social market economy. This finding seems to prevail after the election at the country's CDU. Tolerance seems likely, even a coalition no longer impossible.
Worrying is the new center of the right. In almost all age groups, the Thuringian voters have the AfD elected the strongest party, it is only thanks to the pensioners that it was not in the overall result. Men of working age, in particular, have given their voice to Björn Höcke. According to polls, 39 percent of AfD voters have chosen them not out of disappointment over the other parties, but out of conviction. About one fifth of the Thuringian voters have deliberately chosen a right-wing extremist.
In the column Agitation and Propaganda Stefan Kuzmany writes about the current developments in politics and society. Subscribe to the newsletter directly and for free here:
"Mr Höcke is the center of the party," said AfD leader Alexander Gauland on election night, a remarkable quote. The vain history teacher with the fascist rhetoric, would like to be personally deported to the airport asylum seekers like the NPD a "good trip home" stands, like no other for the uninhibited radicalization of AfD. He is by no means just criticizing refugee policy, he wants a different system. There is no revolution to be expected from teddy-bear left Ramelow. Höcke has the revolution in mind.
But if Björn Höcke is the center of the party, then any of his future remarks will be attributed to the entire party. Then you can not dismiss him as something too glowing national romantic, then he speaks, the frontman of the extreme wing, in the future for the whole AfD.
For many, this is the new center in Thuringia: a fascist who was not elected despite his Nazi rhetoric, but quite deliberately because of it. Or because it does not matter, at least not bad.
But if Björn Höcke is the center of the AfD - who is still waiting at the right edge?
