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On Sunday, the German Christian Democrats won a decisive victory in the elections in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, which was a key to their leader Amin Raschelt and his efforts to succeed Angela Merkel as prime minister in September. That is a huge boost.
The CDU was able to withstand the strong challenge of the far-right German Alternative Party (AfD), which had tried to use General public dissatisfaction During the Covid-19 lockdown.
The prediction of the German public broadcaster ARD is traditionally regarded as an accurate predictor of the final result. The support rate of the Christian Democratic League is 36%, which is 6 percentage points higher than the state’s last election in 2016. AfD lags behind 22.7%, down 1.6% of its 2016 performance.
Forecasts based on the export opinion survey indicate that the current CDU, Social Democratic and Green Party coalition led by Reina Khaselov of the CDU will have enough seats in the regional parliament to continue to govern. But the CDU can also choose to establish partnerships with the Social Democratic Party and the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP).
“I have been prime minister for ten years and people know me, they know… what I stand for,” 67-year-old former scholar Haseloff told ARD. “I think this credibility is a decisive factor.”
He also thanked voters for “building a clear firewall for the extreme right” by supporting the center-right CDU instead of the AfD.
Some opinion polls before the election showed that AfD can defeat the CDU and enter second place. However, even if this happens, it cannot form a government because no other party is willing to ally with it.
AfD achieved amazing results in 2016, when it won nearly a quarter of the vote, reflecting the strong public opposition to Angela Merkel’s free immigration policy and the influx of more than 1 million asylum seekers into Germany , Most of which come from the Middle East, North Africa and Afghanistan.
For the Social Democrats, the junior partner of Merkel’s grand coalition government, it was a frustrating night. Their vote share fell by 2 percentage points to 8.3%-the worst result in the history of post-war Germany. one. The Green Party rose to 6.6%, an increase of 1.4 percentage points from 2016.
“We increased our vote share, but not as much as we hoped,” said Annalena Belbok, the candidate of the Green Party for prime minister.
The FDP, which supports business, received 6.5% of the votes, an increase of 1.6 percentage points from 2016. The left-wing Die Linke, rooted in the former Communist Party that once ruled East Germany, fell from 16.3% to 10.8% five years ago.
Saxony-Anhalt is a small state with a voting-age population of 1.8 million. The reunification of Germany plunged into an economic depression, but it is still recovering. Since 1990, as young people drifted west to find better jobs, the population has decreased by 24%.
As Germany takes measures to close brown coal mines-a large employer in Saxony-Anhalt-as part of its efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the state will face more economic turmoil in the coming decades.
As a result, the Chancellor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, Armin Laschet (Armin Laschet) won. He will serve as the CDU and its Bavarian sister party CSU in the September federal election. This will mark the end of Angela Merkel’s 16 years as prime minister.
The CDU fell in public opinion polls earlier this year and was hit by public disappointment with the slow pace of the vaccination campaign and a corruption scandal involving some Christian Democrats.
There were also doubts about Laschet’s ability to win the Bundestag election. This was exploited by the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, who sought to be appointed as the CDU/CSU prime minister candidate, sparking a fierce power struggle. Raschelt hopes that the decisive outcome of Saxony-Anhalt will eventually dispel these doubts.
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