After a string of bitterly disappointing elections, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) finally have something to celebrate after winning Sunday’s vote in the eastern state of Brandenburg.
Scholz was set to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in New York on Monday.
He’s also likely to comment in detail on the election in Brandenburg, in which his party came first. For much of the summer, opinion polls had shown the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) leading in Brandenburg. But although the AfD made gains in Sunday’s election, the party fell short of overtaking the SPD.
Amid record-high turnout, voters in Brandenburg gave the SPD nearly 31%, according to preliminary results, a boost of almost five percentage points over the SPD’s showing in the most recent state election in 2019.
There was likely a big sigh of relief in New York, where Scholz spent Sunday attending a UN summit and meeting with other world leaders.
The embattled and unpopular Scholz has faced questions about whether he should continue to lead his party into federal parliamentary elections in September 2025. A defeat in Brandenburg, which the SPD has led since 1990, would have increased the pressure.
But Scholz will likely only enjoy a brief reprieve from Sunday’s vote.
The SPD’s hero of the evening was Brandenburg’s popular long-time incumbent state premier, Dietmar Woidke, who explicitly distanced himself from Scholz ahead of the election and refused the chancellor’s support during the campaign.
Woidke instead made the election a referendum on his own personal popularity, vowing to step down if his party didn’t come out on top.
That’s despite the fact that Scholz lives in the Brandenburg capital of Potsdam, located just outside Berlin.
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