Potsdam., German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, increasingly fragile at the national level, achieved respite this Sunday with a narrow victory for his social democratic party –SPD– against the extreme right, in an important regional election.
According to calculations by public television channels ARD and ZDF, the SPD obtained just over 31 percent of the vote, compared to just over 29 percent for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) after the election in Brandenburg, a regional state that It surrounds the capital Berlin in the east of the country.
This result shows a new advance by the German extreme right, which achieved two record numbers in other regional elections on September 1, in Thuringia, where the AfD won, and in Saxony, where it came just behind the conservatives.
For the SPD this is an unexpected success after having fallen behind in every election for months and when at the national level it registers, like Olaf Scholz, records of unpopularity.
This victory owes less to Scholz and much more to the head of the Brandenburg regional government, Dietmar Woidke.
In power in the region since 2013, this social democrat remains very popular and transformed the vote into a plebiscite on his personality and an election for or against the extreme right. He had warned that he would retire if he did not win the elections.
His bet seems to have been successful. The SPD, according to calculations from television networks, is clearly advancing compared to the previous election in 2019, when it reached 26.2 percent of the votes. AfD would also gain about 7 points compared to that year.
According to early estimates, the Social Democrats appear well placed to continue governing Brandenburg within the framework of a coalition with the conservatives (12 percent) and the environmentalists (5 percent).
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– 2024-09-29 12:10:58
