Social Democrats win in Brandenburg with 31% despite the rise of the German far right

The Chancellor’s Social Democrats Olaf Scholz won Sunday’s election in the Brandenburg region surrounding Berlin with 31.2% of the vote and a narrow margin over the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which achieved 29.8%.

The Christian Democrats would be tied – if these projections are confirmed – at 12.1% with the recently emerged Sahra Wagenknecht Allianceof leftist bias, while the Greens would be at 5% and the Christian Democrats (CDU) at 11.8%.

The Participation was 74%almost 13 points above the last elections in 2019, when 61.3% of the census voted.

2.1 million citizens aged 16 or over – just over 3% of the German electorate – were eligible to vote in Brandenburg, of whom 356,000 had requested to send their ballot by post.

If the projections are confirmed, the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Greens would have 47 seats out of a total of 88 in the regional parliament, enough to repeat the coalition that governed the region during the last legislative period.

The far-right AfD, which is classified as suspected of extremism by German intelligence services, would be left with less than a third of the seats, which would not allow it to block important decisions in the chamber.

But the margin is very small and AfD could overtake Social Democrats as vote count progresseswhich would lead the acting Prime Minister, the popular Dietmar Woidke, to make good on his threat to resign and not lead a possible coalition of democratic forces.

With the well-known as ‘cordon sanitaire’ The AfD would not have any real chance of winning a government, but a victory would make negotiations to form a governing coalition in the state much more difficult and would also deal a further blow to the already battered government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The campaign was dominated by issues of migration and security – Brandenburg shares a border with Poland – as well as social issues such as healthcare and housing and foreign policy such as the war in Ukraine.

Brandenburg is the third and last ‘Land’ to hold regional elections this year in eastern Germany, where The AfD has already swept Thuringiabeing the leading force with 32.8% of the votes, and in Saxony, where with a similar percentage it was just one point behind the Christian Democrats winners.

In the last regional elections in Brandenburg, the SPD already managed to beat the AfD by a narrow margin of 26.2 to 23.5 percentage points, while the Christian Democrats and the Greens came in third and fourth with 15.6 and 10.8 percent of the votes respectively.

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