German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his party, the SPD, see themselves strengthened after winning a crucial state election in Brandenburg against the far right, while his challenger’s party, Friedrich Merz, suffered heavy losses.
Exit polls showed a victory for the SPD and its incumbent state Prime Minister, Dietmar Woidke, which was projected to take 32%, ahead of the far-right AfD’s 29%.
With polls neck-and-neck beforehand, German media rumoured that SPD officials could topple Scholz should the SPD suffer its first defeat in Brandenburg since the state joined West Germany in 1990.
Scholz, currently in New York for the United Nations’ general assembly, did not want to comment on the result yet, but said the mood among the party’s leadership was “good, of course” after the exit polls.
SPD leader Lars Klingbeil reaffirmed that the SPD “wants to go into the federal election with Olaf Scholz.”
While the party is currently trailing its opponents in national polls by an average of 14%, officials said the election could offer a model for next year’s national election.
“The SPD in Brandenburg was at 18, 19 % in the polls one-and-a-half months ago and will get a result tonight that is more than 10% above that,” SPD secretary-general Kevin Kühnert told broadcaster ARD.
“That’s, of course, encouraging for my entire party, which will need a lot of catching up if we want to win next year’s election.”
Pyrrhic victory?
However, SPD incumbent Woidke had notably distanced himself from Scholz during the campaign, asking the chancellor not to join the campaign trail. More than half of the SPD’s voters (52%) said in exit polls that they would not have voted for the SPD had it not been for Woidke.
The prime minister also leveraged his personal popularity, as he threatened to resign if his party came second after the AfD, even if it could still form a government.
He might now be forced to coalesce with the newly created, left-populist BSW. The other parties of the national coalition, the Greens and the liberal FDP, failed to get any seats in Brandenburg’s assembly, which led some FDP officials to openly question the survival of Scholz’s coalition.
“A government that is no longer able to solve the challenges in the country together must question itself,” said FDP secretary-general Bijan Djir-Sarai.
“Bitter defeat” for Merz
Yet the result also came as a blow to the main centre-right opposition party, the CDU, early in its campaign to win the chancellery in 2025. Its leader, Friedrich Merz, announced this week that he would run for chancellor next year, ending months of speculation.
At the first election since Merz’s announcement, the CDU was projected to post its worst-ever result in Brandenburg, at 12%, coming even after BSW (13.4%) and fourth overall.
“That is a bitter defeat,” CDU secretary-general Carsten Linnemann told ZDF.
“For weeks, there has been a polarisation: ‘The AfD or [Woidke]’. Many CDU voters said, ‘In that case, I’ll vote for the SPD,” he argued, adding that this was “separate” from Merz.
Earlier this week, Scholz gained popularity in an Insa poll after Merz’s announcement. Thirty-one per cent of respondents said they would elect him as chancellor—a plus of nine per cent that put him level with Merz, who rose by five per cent.
[Edited by Alice Taylor-Braçe]
Source: euractiv.com
