Cologne | The European elections in Cologne 2024. The city administration is now presenting detailed statistics and an analysis of the election results. Who voted for whom in Cologne.
The results as a reminder in the overview
There are two parties in Cologne that have lost votes. These are the Greens and the SPD in Cologne. The Greens lost 8.55 percent compared to the 2019 European elections and the Social Democrats lost 1.75 percent. Taken together, the parties that have dominated Cologne politics for decades lost more than 10 percent of their support. The pan-European party Volt, which ran in the European elections for the second time, achieved the highest increase in votes with 5.54 percent. The AfD was able to gain marginally more votes than the CDU. The others gained.
Although the Greens were able to maintain their leading position in Cologne, they suffered massive losses.
The differentiated analysis
The data comes from the representative electoral statistics for the European elections. For this purpose, 38 representative Cologne constituencies, including 12 postal voting districts, were analyzed. In the analysis now presented by the city of Cologne, 16,500 ballot papers were evaluated, which corresponds to 3.3 percent of Cologne’s eligible voters.
Voter turnout
Young people vote less than average. The parties still have potential to mobilize 16- to 24-year-olds in Cologne, as only 57.1 percent of them voted in the 2024 European elections. Overall, voter turnout was 66 percent. It should come as no surprise that the CDU and SPD were above average in terms of success among older Cologne voters over 70 years of age. The CDU achieved 39.3 percent in this group of voters and the SPD 26.6 percent. Both parties thus performed well above their actual share of the vote in this group. Among younger voters up to 44 years of age, both parties performed below average. The Cologne CDU was only able to convince 5.4 percent of first-time voters who were allowed to vote for the first time at the age of 16 in these European elections. The Cologne CDU appeals primarily to men, while there is almost a balance between the sexes among SPD voters.
The SPD is the party of the elderly. Among young voters up to 45 years of age, the Social Democrats can only mobilize 10 percent for themselves and their policies. The SPD in Cologne has the second oldest electorate in Cologne after the CDU.
Almost twice as many men as women vote for the AfD, and the voters are older. Men between the ages of 60 and 69 in particular vote for the Cologne AfD. In contrast, only 2 percent of women in Cologne under the age of 35 vote for the right-wing party.
The FDP has a predominantly male electorate and has potential among younger voters. This also applies to Volt and the Left, which appeal primarily to voters under 45. The Left can score points especially with women.
The Greens, currently the leading political force in Cologne, appeal primarily to the urban clientele between the ages of 25 and 44. Another characteristic is that the Cologne Greens convince far more women than men and are more likely to attract voters from women. Two thirds of the electorate in the European elections were women, and one third of them are younger than 35 years old.
