Brandenburg Election: Chancellor Scholz’s Party Narrowly Escapes Another Debacle

The election for the new parliament of the German state of Brandenburg on Sept. 22 ended up with a very slim win for the Social Democrats (SPD), at 30.7%, over the Alternative for Germany (AfD) at 29.4%, after opinion polls had shown the contrary. A decisive factor in boosting the SPD was the spectacular endorsement of the party on the eve of the election by Michael Kretschmer, the CDU Prime Minister of Saxony, who had just won that state’s election on Sept. 1 (cf. SAS 36/24). His message to potential CDU voters in Brandenburg was to vote social democrat in order to defeat the “extremist” AfD. But it also resulted in a loss of 3.5% for the CDU compared to 2019, putting it in fourth position with 12.1% of the vote.

The BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht party) conquered position number 3 with 13.6%, a very impressive result since the Brandenburg section of the party was established just five months ago. The BSW campaign against war and against weapons deliveries to Ukraine obviously resonated with many voters, while the Greens, the leading war party in Germany, was voted out of the state parliament altogether, with only 4.1% or 6.5% less than five years ago, due to the same anti-war sentiment. How the new state government will be formed remains to be fought out, but it could lead to a much-needed debate on foreign policy as well, if the BSW does insist on putting such issues on the table.

In any case, this election result will also have repercussions on the national and international level. The failure of the Greens to overcome the 5% hurdle to enter parliament in Thuringia on Sept. 1 and now in Brandenburg, and the failure of the FDP in all three elections (1,1% being its best score), puts a huge question mark on the future of Chancellor Scholz’s national coalition with those two partners. Earlier this year, there was an initiative inside the FDP to call for a referendum of the membership on whether the party should pull out of the coalition in order to survive, and it may well resurface now.

FDP national party vice chairman Wolfgang Kubicki already warned a few hours after the Brandenburg results were in, that some kind of decision had to be taken in the next few weeks: “We won’t wait until Christmas. We can’t expect the country to do that.”

Internationally, the dwindling domestic support has considerably weakened the Scholz government, with many outside the country asking whether it will survive the remaining year of its term or fall apart months before the scheduled national election in September 2025. The outcome of the U.S. presidential election in November and the policies of the new President, with war or peace being the pressing issue, will also play an important role in any major political changes in Germany.