The Bavarian election results are a glimpse of Europe’s future

For some time now, the narrative of German politics has been the rise of the far-right AfD: from nowhere to a minor but significant party. While the AfD haven’t gone away, Sunday’s Bavarian elections show that the story is more complicated.

The main way conservatives across Europe have reacted to the rise of right-wing populism has been to steal its clothes. If this is what voters want, then they can have it, the centre right has said. And they can get it from us.

Britain is the best successful example of this strategy, where Theresa May’s Tories have eaten Ukip by embracing Brexit, lambasting “citizens of nowhere” and swelling their poll share to one they have not enjoyed for decades.

But Bavaria is now the best example of where this approach has gone wrong. For months before the election the CSU, the regional conservative allies of Angela Merkel who have dominated politics in the state since 1949, banged on about immigration. They faced down the chancellor and forced changes in refugee policy at a national level. The goal was to show voters there was no need to vote AfD if they wanted to be mean to foreigners.

When polling day came on Sunday, the CSU lost a good chunk of voters to the AfD, as expected. But it lost more, according to a polling analysis by Der Spiegel, to the Greens – swathes of its one-time supporters apparently horrified at the party’s increasingly xenophobic tenor.

The Greens have been unambiguously pro-refugee and are on the rise across Germany, especially so in Bavaria. They took second place and denied the CSU a majority for only the second time since 1949 – in elections fought under a proportional system.

The environmentalists, who are less radical than their UK-based counterparts but nonetheless left of centre, are now flying high in the national polls, with an increasing number of surveys showing them taking second place.

They have done this before, a few years ago, when a row over nuclear power was making headlines in Germany. Merkel neutered them simply by adopting their policies and pledging to close down nuclear plants. The pragmatic chancellor may have less room for manoeuvre this time, however – with pressures both to her left and right on immigration.

There are other strands to the story, too. The social democrats, who are in coalition with Merkel’s conservatives at a federal level, lost voters to basically everyone, sinking for fourth place. Once a force to be reckoned with, they are now in serious need of a rethink and recovery if they are to even survive. They yet show little sign of having the energy to reinvent themselves.

Their story is common across Europe, from France to the Netherlands; from Greece to Italy; where once-powerful centre-left social democratic parties are being eviscerated. Germany’s SPD has taken a particular beating from having twice now signed up to work with the conservatives, with little to show for it. When the government does things wrong they get blamed, when it does things right, they get little credit.

Whether the Greens will stay on the up is not certain. German politics for the last decade has been a bit of a carousel, with minor parties getting some time in the sun between general elections as voters search around for an alternative before losing interest. The Greens, the Left, even the Pirate Party, have all at various points had temporary surges – but the only force that has sustained increased support so far has been the far right.

But what does look certain is that Germany’s conservative establishment is not immune from the rot that has been afflicting its social democratic one. The centre right in European countries – who across the continent have weathered challenges to their dominance with far more resilience than their left-of-centre counterparts– will be watching with an interested fear.