June 10, 2024
Germany’s Scholz says no return to ‘business as usual’ after EU vote
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday evening that the European election results were “bad for all three governing parties” — his Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — and warned that there could be no return to “business as usual.”
Speaking to reporters in Berlin after a meeting with the president of Chile, Scholz said: “We have to do our work and ensure that our country makes progress and becomes more modern, ensuring that support grows so that we can present results and have the trust of citizens at the next federal elections.”
After the SPD won just 13.9% of the vote, its worst result in a nationwide democratic election in more than 130 years, Scholz warned that the policies of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which came second at 15.9%, must not become normalized.
“We should never get used to that,” he said. “The task must always be to push them back again.”
Despite the electoral drubbing, and the success of the far-right across Germany and other parts of Europe, Scholz insisted that there was ultimately still a significant majority in favor of classic democratic parties.
The conservative opposition Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) won 30% of the vote in Germany. At the EU level, Ursula von der Leyen‘s conservative alliance, the European People’s Party (EPP), also came out as the largest bloc in the parliament.
Though French President Emmanuel Macron had responded to a bad result for his party in France by calling snap legislative elections for June, the German Greens insist that the ruling coalition in Berlin will endure.
“There is no need for a vote of confidence,” Green co-leader Omid Nouripour said. The Greens won only 11.9% of the vote — down from 20.5% in the 2019 European Parliament election.