The far-right Alternative for Germany party made the biggest gains in vote share in Baden-Württemberg, tapping into anxieties about the stat
...anxieties about the state’s struggling auto industry. Germany’s center-left Greens scraped out a narrow victory in a key vote in Baden-Württemberg on Sunday, according to preliminary results, marking a stinging defeat for the parties 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 had maintained a significant lead in the 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 in its long history. But the Greens, under former federal Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir, surged in polling ahead of the vote, ultimately coming first with 30.3 percent according to a preliminary count. The CDU came 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 the 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 to take place 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.
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