“A gap seems to have widened between French political culture and that of Germany”assures the historian Hartmut Kaelble on the site of the German television N-TV.
“It is impossible to imagine a sharper contrast than that between the victorious SPD chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the French socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, who has fallen to only a few percent of voters, he explains. Lhe contrast between the French and German Greens is just as marked.”
But it is the state of the right and the extreme right that intrigues the German academic. While in France Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour counted nearly 30% of the votes, Germany saw the national scores of the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) drop in the last legislative elections. The French right, which could be compared to the CDU, is also much worse off than its German equivalent.
Macron’s adventure, “unthinkable in Germany”
For Hartmut Kaelble, France is more permeable to “authoritarian populism”, but it is also more open to political innovations. A party like La République en Marche, “started from nothing and victorious from its creation”would be according to him “unthinkable in Germany”.
The German Greens have thus “sat for forty years in the Bundestag” before rising in the polls. However, it is not certain that Emmanuel Macron’s political movement will do well in the legislative elections, warns Kaelble.