The German conservatives (CSU/CDU) won the elections in Bavaria and Hesse this Sunday, without an absolute majority, while the far-right AfD party made strong gains in both states and the government parties suffered a heavy defeat.
According to the provisional results at around 23:00 local time, which should no longer undergo major changes, in Bavaria, whose capital is Munich, the Christian Social Union (CSU) won with 36.6%, a clear victory, but It is still his worst result in More than 70 years (-0.6 percentage points than in the previous elections in 2018), and he is expected to return in coalition with the populist party Free Voters (FW, its German acronym, of ‘Freie Wähler’), which rose to 15.1%. (+3.5%).
In Hesse, the federal state in which the country’s financial center, Frankfurt, is located, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) achieved a much more convincing victory than in 2018, reaching 34.5% (plus 7.5%) , and should govern in coalition, for the third consecutive term, with the Greens, despite falling 5 points compared to 2018, remaining at 14.8%.
One of the big winners of the night is the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which grows more than 5 points in both states – where the conservatives had already rejected any possibility of an alliance with this far-right force -, becoming the second political force in Hesse and, most likely, in Bavaria.
In Hesse, the AfD should reach 18.4%, 5.3 points more than five years ago, and in Bavaria it would reach, according to still provisional results, 15.9%, which would place it in second place, ahead of the FW and the Greens.
The coalition parties currently in power suffered heavy defeats, in particular the socialists of the SPD, of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, but also the Greens and the Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), the latter even “disappeared” from both regional parliaments.
In Bavaria, the SPD falls to 7.9%, compared to 9.7% five years ago, the Greens fall to 14.9% (compared to 17.6% in the previous elections), while the FDP remains outside the regional parliament, not reaching 5%. threshold for electing deputies, remaining at 2.9%.
In Hesse, where they even had ambitions to end the hegemony of the CDU, the SPD socialists obtained only 15.1% of the votes, compared to 19.8% five years ago, behind the Greens (14.8 %), while the FDP will only know first thing in the morning if it will be able to have parliamentary representation, since the provisional results give it precisely 5% (it had obtained 7.5% in 2018).
Today’s elections were considered a true test to “take the pulse” of German political reality, in a context of the rise of the extreme right and the unpopularity of the center-left coalition government, as represented by the two states that came to vote, as a whole, it represents practically a quarter of Germany’s population and more than a quarter of German economic production.
Source: TSF
