Germany’s Social Democrats have won a narrow victory in elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg, an unexpected reprieve for Olaf Scholz as he prepares to run for a second term as chancellor next year.
Preliminary official results put Scholz’s SPD at 30.9 per cent, ahead of the far-right Alternative for Germany with 29.2 per cent.
They suggest the SPD can continue to govern Brandenburg, a state that the party has ruled since German reunification in 1990 and which has long been seen as one of its national strongholds.
However, it will be forced to share power with a new leftwing populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which fiercely opposes irregular immigration and military aid to Ukraine.
It will also have to deal with an emboldened AfD, which now enjoys a so-called blocking minority in the Brandenburg parliament.
The Brandenburg result will relieve pressure on the chancellor, whose approval ratings have slumped in recent months and who has been named by pollsters as the least popular chancellor since German reunification. A survey published last week found only 3 per cent of voters supported his coalition of the SPD, Greens and liberals.
Many in the SPD have privately suggested that Scholz set aside his ambitions of running for a second term in next year’s Bundestag election and improve the party’s fortunes by making way for a more popular politician, such as defence minister Boris Pistorius.
But with the SPD’s victory in Brandenburg, such critical voices may be silenced, at least temporarily.
The preliminary results show that the huge gamble undertaken by Brandenburg’s prime minister, Dietmar Woidke, appears to have paid off.
Woidke had threatened to resign if the AfD came first in Sunday’s election. The threat galvanised moderate voters of all persuasion, who rallied round their prime minister and secured him a narrow victory.
An exit poll by ARD found 75 per cent of SPD voters and 59 per cent of voters for the centre-right Christian Democratic Union said they were “not convinced by the party, but I’m voting for it to prevent a strong AfD”.
“It seems to be the case that it was the Social Democrats, as so often in history, that stopped the extremists on their path to power,” Woidke told supporters on Sunday.
“Dietmar Woidke and the Brandenburg SPD have staged a furious catch-up race,” said Kevin Kühnert, the SPD’s national general secretary, noting that the party had been polling below 20 per cent a few weeks ago but, according to exit polls, was now above 30 per cent.
Experts said one reason for Woidke’s success was his decision to eschew joint appearances with Scholz, in a clear attempt to prevent his local SPD being tainted by association with an unpopular chancellor.
However, the SPD’s success in Brandenburg is unlikely to translate into better approval ratings nationwide. The party — together with its coalition partners, the Greens and liberal Free Democrats — has been blamed by voters for high inflation, surging energy costs and a stagnating economy.
The outcome in Brandenburg was also encouraging for the anti-immigrant AfD, large parts of which, in the view of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, threaten the country’s democratic system.
Three weeks ago it won elections in the eastern state of Thuringia, making it the first far-right party to secure victory in a regional poll in Germany’s postwar history. It also came second in neighbouring Saxony, just behind the centre-right CDU.
The party has profited from rising public concern about irregular immigration, especially in the wake of a terror attack in the western city of Solingen in August.
The preliminary results from Sunday’s election show the AfD will have more than one-third of the seats in the Brandenburg legislature, giving it the power to block decisions that require a two-thirds majority, such as changes to the state’s constitution, or the appointment of constitutional court judges.
The AfD also enjoys a blocking minority in Thuringia.
“The support we got in this campaign, the influx of young people, proves that we are the party of the future,” Hans-Christian Berndt, the AfD’s top candidate in Brandenburg, said on Sunday night.
Woidke has led a coalition of the SPD, CDU and Greens since 2019. However, the Greens only won 4.1 per cent of the vote on Sunday, falling below the 5 per cent threshold required to guarantee representation in the local parliament.
That means Woidke will have to govern with the BSW, which was only formed in Brandenburg four months ago but won 13.5 per cent of the vote, according to preliminary results.
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