NEW POLL: Alternative für Deutschland on the verge of an absolute majority in Sachsen-Anhalt

That graph, dear readers, is the latest source of indigestion for the centre-right CDU. On 6 September, voters in Sachsen-Anhalt will elect a new state parliament. That is in just four months, and this is the latest polling data. It shows that Alternative für Deutschland are on the verge of an absolute majority in this East German state. We could’ve guessed this already, but it is good always to have confirmation. If these numbers were election results, the AfD would fall just a few seats short. Of course, these are not election results, and according to me it is more likely than not that the Social Democrats fail to breach the 5% hurdle for representation in the Landtag entirely. Outside of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it is very hard to find SPD voters in the East any longer. And if the SPD fails to make it into parliament, then AfD already have their absolute majority even with these numbers, which are very likely to improve still further in the coming months as the CDU continues to circle the toilet and their voters continue to desert them. An absolute majority of seats in the Landtag means the firewall doesn’t matter anymore. It means all the procedural tricks used to disadvantage the AfD won’t be available to the cartel parties anymore. And it also means that two weeks after the election in Sachsen-Anhalt, when voters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern go to the polls, the AfD will have a lot of publicity and momentum suddenly on their side. They just might seize the absolute majority there too. Just like that, two German states could get majority AfD governments, after thirteen years of legal and administrative chicanery, press smears and relentless political exclusion. If that happens – and I think, conservatively speaking, there is a 60% chance it happens in Sachsen-Anhalt at least – we’ll understand once and for all what kind of political system we live in. The self-proclaimed defenders of “our democracy” (by which they mean, their democracy) will probably not just shrug and let this go, and our strange Basic Law grants them some unusual tools to subvert the popular will. The world will see whether the East Germans can truly elect parliaments of their choosing, or whether they have stumbled into another closed dysfunctional political trap where votes are a mere pretence – a mere 35 years after they escaped the last such trap.