ZThere are a total of five years between the two most recent state elections in Lower Saxony – unlike before. But this measure of time is a highly imperfect description of what has changed in and for Germany since October 2017.
At that time, the CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP were considering the possibility of a federal coalition, the defeated SPD was led by a certain Martin Schulz, and the main concern of Lower Saxony was no longer the many war refugees and migrants who had sought salvation in Germany since 2015 had.
Between the Harz Mountains and the North Sea, the most important issue was the more than moderate state of the education system.
Today, state politicians would be happy if they had to prove their ability to deal with the crisis using this eternal problem child. Instead, as a result of the war in Ukraine, they are confronted with phenomena every day for which there were hardly any words five years ago, such as the energy crisis or rampant inflation.
But anyone in the opposition or as a smaller coalition partner who believed that the palpable dissatisfaction with the federal government could translate into a mood of change in Lower Saxony saw themselves disappointed on Sunday evening.
If one disregards the expected high mobilization of potential AfD voters, the signs point less to a new beginning than to a return to the status quo ante called red-green, which gives a sense of security: A featureless CDU is named the Mesalliance with the worst result since 1955 dismissed into the opposition in the grand coalition, the Free Democrats will probably once again not be needed to form a government, the Greens are becoming stronger than ever – but the gap to the SPD, which presents itself as conservative and solid, is so large, despite losses, that it seems that in this respect too Time stopped in Lower Saxony.
Should citizens everywhere in the country keep this calm over the winter, it would – in a figurative sense – not be the worst choice.