The Importance of the Institution of Elections in Germany’s Domestic and Foreign Policy

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the transformation of the electoral institution in Germany against the backdrop of the development of the concept of a “change of eras” and the tendency towards the growing importance of security issues for Germany’s foreign and domestic policy. The aim of the study is to identify how the German political community perceives elections as an element of Germany’s domestic and foreign policy. For a long time, elections remained an important part of the German state structure, ensuring adherence to its democratic principles. However, the growing complexity of the party structure in (Western) German politics and the gradual erosion of the positions of the “people’s” parties, the CDU / CSU and the SPD, brought to the fore new political forces that came to be seen as a threat to German democracy. While the cooptation of the Eastern German PDS into German politics ultimately proceeded relatively painlessly for the German political system, the electoral successes of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party led to a rise in alarmist sentiments in Germany and the emergence of the “firewall” phenomenon – a boycott of the party by mainstream political forces. The high level of support for opposition parties has sparked a debate about destructive external interference in Germany’s electoral processes. Since the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis in February 2022, the Russian Federation has been almost invariably cited as the source of such interference. At the same time, the German government’s approach to elections in other countries through the prism of a “values-based” foreign policy has provoked crises in bilateral relations, with consequences that extend far beyond those relations. An illustrative example of this approach was the German leadership’s actions regarding the 2020 presidential election in Belarus. Criticism of the electoral processes in Belarus not only undermined the cautious normalization of the bilateral relations in the second half of the 2010s but also became a significant indicator of the escalation of crises in the European security system in the early 2020s, culminating in the escalation of the armed conflict in Ukraine.

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