Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the German politics myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats are facing the prospect of finishing second in key regional elections in south-western Germany after projections showed the ruling Greens in a narrow lead in the industrial state of Baden-Württemberg.
Merz had hoped to reclaim the 11mn-strong state — an export powerhouse home to companies such as Porsche, Mercedes, Bosch and SAP — in a major electoral test a year after taking office as chancellor and ahead of more challenging regional elections later this year.
But projections based on actual votes from two polling groups on Sunday suggested that the Greens, which have led coalition governments in Baden-Württemberg since 2011, had narrowly secured the largest share of the vote with 30.3 per cent. The party won 32.6 per cent of votes in the 2021 state election, but only 11.6 per cent in last year’s federal elections.
Merz’s CDU, which is the Greens’ junior coalition partner in the state, is projected to gain 29.7 per cent of the vote — an increase from 24 per cent in 2021 but a disappointment after leading opinion polls for months.
Alternative for Germany is projected to nearly double its vote share to 18.7-18.8 per cent, from 9.7 per cent in the last state election. This would underperform the roughly 25 per cent support the far-right party commands in national opinion polls, however.
The Social Democrats, Merz’s coalition partners at the federal level, were predicted to secure a mere 5.5-5.6 per cent, down from 11 per cent in 2021.
The liberal Free Democrats, who had continuously won seats in the regional parliament since 1952, failed to step over the 5 per cent threshold allowing representation.
The Baden-Württemberg polls — the first of five regional elections this year — had been seen as the most winnable and politically significant for Merz, who was elected chancellor last year on a promise to revive Germany’s stagnating economy. Baden-Württemberg’s export-oriented companies, in particular in the automotive sector, have suffered from fierce Chinese competition and US tariffs.
If the results are confirmed, they are “not going to be a boost for Merz”, said Andreas Busch, professor of political sciences at Göttingen university. “They counted the chickens before they hatched.”
The likely AfD result “underlines that the party has moved well beyond being an east German phenomenon,” Carsten Brzeski, global head of macro at ING, wrote. “In Baden-Württemberg, the AfD’s gains are also a reflection of the structural weaknesses of an economy in painful transition: what coal and steel were to the Ruhr Valley, the combustion engine risks becoming to this state.”
The CDU previously dominated the traditionally conservative state after its creation in 1952. Manuel Hagel, its 37-year-old candidate, had for months been expected to win comfortably after the state’s long-serving Green premier Winfried Kretschmann, 77, announced he would step down after being in office since 2011.
But support for Hagel slipped after a 2018 video resurfaced in which he appeared to make borderline sexist remarks about teenage girls.
If confirmed, a Green win would mark a striking victory for the party and its candidate Cem Özdemir, who would be well placed to become the first German state premier of Turkish descent in a coalition with the CDU.
“While Hagel had held a significant lead until just a few weeks ago, Özdemir performed an impressive late surge,” added Brzeski. “The better-known and more personally popular candidate, he ran a disciplined, pragmatist campaign designed to detoxify the Greens’ regulatory image.”
Özdemir, 60, was born in Baden-Württemberg to Turkish immigrants and served as agriculture minister in the ill-fated federal coalition of Social Democratic chancellor Olaf Scholz. A veteran of both regional and federal politics, he has been active in the Greens since the 1980s. He was also an MEP for five years.
About The Author
