German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic SPD won the state elections in Saarland on Sunday. This is apparent from forecasts from the channels ARD and ZDF. Top candidate Anke Rehlinger of SPD wins with flying colors. The Christian Democratic CDU of current Prime Minister Tobias Hans has to swallow a historic defeat.
The SPD would end up with 43 to 44 percent of the vote in the small state. That is a lot more than the 27.5 percent for the CDU. The Greens, the liberal FDP and the far-right AfD are fighting to pass the 5% electoral threshold and thus gain a seat in the state parliament.
The 45-year-old Rehlinger, until now Minister of Economy in Saarland, thus stands a good chance of becoming the new Prime Minister. Her SPD has so far been the smaller partner in a grand coalition with 44-year-old Hans’s CDU.
For CDU, the loss of Saarland is a famous downer. The Christian Democratic Party has supplied the Prime Minister in the state since 1999. That is a reign of almost a quarter of a century.
The defeat is also bad news nationally. After the historically poor result in the 2021 parliamentary elections and the end of the Angela Merkel era, the CDU, led by new chairman Friedrich Merz, is doing everything it can to put itself back on the political map.
This initially went well, and the party again surpassed the SPD in many polls. The war in Ukraine, however, led to a turnaround.
For the so-called ‘traffic light coalition’ (‘Ampelkoalition’) of Chancellor Scholz, and especially his SPD, the result in Saarland is a boost. Scholz’s government is thus brioly passing its first major test.
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