'Olaf Scolz is already a deeply unpopular chancellor'
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00:00 Olaf Scholz is already a deeply unpopular Chancellor.
00:04 These are the worst set of results for his SPD party since the Second World War.
00:10 I mean, already five years ago in the European elections they were the worst results.
00:14 These are even worse.
00:15 They've lost a couple of seats.
00:17 They're down to now a projected 14 seats in the European Parliament out of the 96, which Germany has.
00:24 And the CDU-CSU coalition, they're on 29 seats, possibly 30, pretty much unchanged.
00:33 AFD, the extreme right-wing party that had some problems before the election with one of its leaders saying that SS men during the war weren't all criminals,
00:44 they didn't get quite as many as pollsters thought they would get.
00:47 They got a 15.6% share according to official preliminary EU results I'm looking at now.
00:54 They look to gain six seats.
00:56 Now, obviously, they're pretty jubilant.
00:58 What it means for Scholz is he's going to struggle.
01:01 His government is already deeply unpopular.
01:03 I mean, the Greens plunged nine seats down to a projected nine seats down to a projected 12 from the 20 they had before.
01:13 And there was a big shift in the vote for the Greens.
01:16 Young people voting, taking their votes away from the Greens and giving them to the extreme right or to new parties like Volt.
01:23 For Scholz, this is bad news.
01:25 And as de Veldt says, yeah, the Germans look at the French president and think, yeah, you know, he's got some grit and determination.
01:34 He's thrown down the gauntlet to the national rally.
01:37 What about Scholz? Scholz hasn't said anything so far.
01:40 And these were historic results for the far right AFD, despite a slew of pre-election scandals where even their allies in Brussels,
01:49 identity and democracy took a distance from them over those comments about the SS.
01:56 What can AFD expect to reap in terms of the results last night?
02:05 I mean, the really troublesome thing here for those who are opposed to the advance of the extreme right in Germany and across Europe is that AFD polled extremely well in eastern Germany.
02:19 Figures of 25, 26, 27 percent in some parts of eastern Germany.
02:24 And there's a set of local elections coming up in September in Saxony, Thuringia and Berlin Brandenburg, which is the rural area around the capital, where they also polled very well.
02:37 So it's quite likely that in regional elections to the Bundestag in the autumn, you may see AFD doing well again and actually much better in some constituencies.
02:50 I mean, largely across the east of this country, they have quite a lot of support, as we've seen in the in the greater mix for the European elections.
03:02 Not as well as they expected. I mean, some some people thought that they might pull 20 percent of the vote yesterday.
03:11 It didn't, as I'm saying, the official preliminary figures from the EU this morning, 15.6 percent, a little bit down on some of the projections late last night.
03:22 But there's still a significant worry for Chancellor Schultz.
03:27 And people look at him and think, well, you've got to up your game.
03:30 You've actually got to offer us something, because otherwise we will give our votes to other parties.
03:37 We're not happy with you. It's a big signal for Schultz.
03:40 has some deep thinking to do now.