More to Come

We are roughly 13 months away from the Saxony-Anhalt state election, and it promises to duplicate the Thuringia 'crisis' as well.

So to lay out the 2016 election and how it relates to the present time period....let's look at the numbers for that election:

CDU (right-of-center): 29.8 percent
AfD (far-right): 24.2 percent
Linke Party (far-left): 16.3 percent
SPD (left-of-center): 10.6 percent
Greens (left): 5.2 percent
FDP (right-of-center): 4.9 percent (meaning they did not get seats in the state assembly)

Looking at present-day politics, the affect of Thuringia on Saxony-Anhalt....I would go and suggest the five likely trends in the 2021 state election:

1.  You can carve off half the votes that the FDP got in 2016 (they topped off at 54,525 in 2016).  The Thuringian damage will be an issue.

2.  You can probably expect the current downward trend of the SPD.....to carve off 20,000 voters for them, and limit them to 7-to-8 percent of the state vote.  The Greens likely get that 20,000, and go up two points. 

3.  The Linke Party will get some gain, maybe pumping up to around 19-to-20 percent of the state vote.

4.  The CDU element in this state election will slide from the 2016 results....maybe falling three points. 

5.  The AfD Party will likely come close to 27-percent, and likely win in this election.

So the question is....can the AfD form a government, and get a partner?  No.  And this will then trigger the obvious problem.....the weakened CDU folks can't partner with the far-left Linke, and the team of CDU-SPD-Green will NOT be able to have enough majority votes to run the government.  Even if the CDU decided to run a minority government, with the partners of the Greens and SPD.....one might go and expect both to suggest their candidates as the Premier-President, instead of the CDU choice.

To have this type of situation break out six months before the national election in October 2021?  Well, it's a mess that would really bring harm to the process and make Germans question how politics can sustain itself in this type of atmosphere.

So this Thuringia crisis is just the first act?  Yep.....you've got much more to come in 2021.