Germany’s Greens set to win key state vote in blow to Merz’s coalition

Germany’s center-left Greens scraped a narrow victory in a key vote in Baden-Württemberg on Sunday, according to preliminary results, marking a stinging defeat for the parties that rule in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative -led coalition government.

The outcome in Germany’s third-most-populous state — an industrial powerhouse home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche —  deals a major blow to Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which maintained a significant lead in polls until the final days of the campaign, as well as to his center-left coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) — which appears set to suffer its worst result in a federal or state election its long history.

But the Greens, under former federal agriculture minister Cem Özdemir, surged in polls ahead of the vote, ultimately coming in first with 30.3 percent, according to a preliminary count. The CDU came in second with 29.7 percent — an increase from the last election, but not enough to overtake the Greens.

“What a tremendous comeback!” Özdemir told his cheering supporters after polls closed. The Greens’ victory was due largely to the centrist Özdemir’s popularity with voters, surveys indicated.

The vote in Baden-Württemberg is the first of five state elections and numerous local contests across the country over the next several months in what Germans are calling a Superwahljahr (“super election year”). The votes are widely seen as a key test of the national mood as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party seeks to overtake Merz’s conservatives and secure big victories in two eastern states in September.

Özdemir is now set to replace the popular Green premier Winfried Kretschmann, 77, who had decided not to seek another term. CDU leaders had hoped Kretschmann’s departure would allow them to recapture the state from the Greens, which was a conservative stronghold before Kretschmann came to power in 2011.

CDU top candidate Manuel Hagel greets supporters at a rally near Stuttgart last week (center). Ferdinand Knapp/POLITICO

The CDU’s top candidate, Manuel Hagel, 37, came under criticism after a 2018 video of him making comments about a visit to a high school class surfaced during the campaign in which he said there were “worse places” for a young lawmaker to be than a class made of 80 percent girls. Hagel’s allies depicted the video, which was posted by a Green Party lawmaker, as part of a smear campaign.

In a campaign dominated by concerns over the decline of the state’s vaunted car industry, however, the AfD emerged as the biggest winner of the night in terms of the vote share gained, finishing a strong third with 18.7 percent, according to preliminary results, nearly doubling its support.

The far-right party leveraged rising economic grievances and growing discontent among workers in the manufacturing sector to make the state one of its strongest bases of support in western part of the country, outside its traditional bastions in the former East Germany.

“We have effectively established ourselves here as the key opposition force in the southwest,” Markus Frohnmaier, the AfD’s top candidate in the state, said Sunday night.

The Greens, who have long been more conservative in Baden-Württemberg than elsewhere in the country, have little choice but to once again form a coalition with the conservative CDU in the state.

The SPD scored just 5.5 percent, according to preliminary results, a historically bad performance that raises questions about whether the party’s participation in Merz’s conservative-led coalition is causing the struggling center-left party to lose more of its voter base.

“It’s indeed a very bitter election night,” SPD national co-leader Bärbel Bas said of the result.

The pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) failed to make the five percent threshold needed to enter the state parliament, according to early results. It’s the first time in the party’s history that is has failed to make it into the Baden-Württemberg state parliament. That result that could well be a death knell for a party that has been a fixture of German postwar politics.