It is not the case that the AfD did particularly well in the local elections in Lower Saxony. At 15.9 percent, the party's national average remained well below its recent results in the state elections in East Germany. In the direct elections for mayors, mayors and district administrators, the party was unable to get any of its candidates across the country.
Even in the three Lower Saxony municipalities in which an AfD candidate made it into the runoff, the party lost to its respective competitors in the second round. And yet these Lower Saxony elections could subsequently become a success for the party of Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla: In four municipalities, AfD applicants whose candidacies had been rejected have lodged objections against the validity of the election in the past few days.
In the districts of Lüneburg and Friesland, the newly elected district councils are to decide at the beginning of November on the objections of the deputy AfD state chairman Stephan Bothe and the AfD member of the Bundestag Martin Sichert. Both of them had been denied participation in the district elections by the responsible election committees - citing doubts about the constitutionality necessary to fill the desired offices. The AfD regional association has been classified as definitely right-wing extremist by the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Two AfD mayoral candidates were also excluded from the election. In Wilhelmshaven, state parliament member Thorsten Moriße was not allowed to run for mayor. In the city of Herzberg am Harz, the chairman of the AfD district of Göttingen, Justin Vogel, was not allowed to take part in the mayoral election. Moriße and Vogel have also now lodged objections to the validity of these elections. The council meetings of the two cities will also decide on this in a timely manner.
In the event that the respective local parliaments, in which the other parties each have large majorities, do not accept the objections, all four rejected candidates want to go to the regular courts. “If rejected, we will go to the administrative court,” confirms the spokesman for the AfD Lower Saxony regional association, Patrick Bauer. And then at the latest things could get exciting. For those affected, but also for the red-green coalition in Lower Saxony.
In the spring, a few months before the local elections, the Lower Saxony electoral regulations were changed to the effect that candidates for full-time mayoral and district administrator positions, which are therefore subject to civil service law, must be more intensively checked for their constitutionality before the election. The local electoral committees responsible for approving candidates must consult the respective higher-level authority - in the case of district administrator and mayoral elections in independent cities, this is usually the state Ministry of the Interior - if there is "actual evidence of a candidate's lack of loyalty to the constitution".
As a result, numerous AfD candidates in Lower Saxony were checked for their loyalty to the constitution. Most of them were allowed to vote. In the cases of Bothe, Sichert, Moriße and Vogel, however, the responsible electoral committees, usually made up of representatives of the respective parliamentary parties, decided negatively. Urgent applications from those affected against these decisions were initially rejected by the responsible administrative courts and then finally rejected by the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court (OVG) at the beginning of September.
However, the Lüneburg judges did not decide on the matter at the time, but rather formally. They pointed out the priority of a smooth, simultaneous and timely conduct of the local elections scheduled for September 13th. Following this, according to the OVG, the rejected applicants could lodge an objection against their exclusion and thus against the validity of the election. “The direct elections to which the applicants were not admitted could, if necessary, subsequently be declared invalid in an election verification process to be carried out within a reasonable period of time,” said the reasons for the judgment.
In Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, courts have confirmed the exclusion of AfD candidates from mayoral elections in similar cases. However, with regard to the Lower Saxony cases, there are obviously doubts. In its urgent decision, the Oldenburg administrative court dealing with the Moriße case left it open whether the AfD candidate's statements used to justify his exclusion from the election were actually suitable to demonstrate doubts about his loyalty to the constitution. Moriße had used, among other things, a blatant case of social welfare abuse by what he called a “Nigerian with a German passport” on social media to advertise for the AfD.
The Oldenburg judges also indicated a certain distance from the change to the electoral regulations decided by the red-green state parliament coalition in April. The justification for the decision states: Whether individual elements of the constitutional fidelity test newly regulated in the Lower Saxony electoral regulations "withstand comprehensive constitutional control in every respect or whether the electoral committee, in view of its (...) politically determined composition, has sufficient constitutional legitimacy to make an approval decision of the type at issue here, is not something the chamber has to decide in the present proceedings". According to the court, the clarification of such questions must be left to the election verification process.
At the end - at least that's what the two inadmissible candidates Moriße and Bothe have announced - there should be either repeat elections in the affected municipalities or a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe on the new Lower Saxony electoral regulations and their consequences for the decision-making powers of local election committees.
