Baden-Württemberg Elections: Local Trumps Global

According to the polls, at 8pm CET, the Greens won the elections in Baden-Württemberg and Cem Özdemir will very likely to be the next Minister-President. The Greens came in at 30.4% (slightly lower than at the last elections in 2021), while the CDU gained 29.7% (up from 24.1%). The AfD came in as the third-largest party at 18.6% (up from 9.7%) and the SPD at 5.6% (down from 11%). All other parties failed to clear the 5% threshold. It cannot be entirely excluded that the margin between the Greens and the CDU could still shrink or even reverse in the course of the evening.

Regional elections in Germany can be driven by local topics and candidates, national trends, or sometimes both. The result in Baden-Württemberg appears to have been dominated above all by the race between the two main contenders for the Minister-President job: the Greens' Cem Özdemir and the CDU's Manuel Hagel. While Hagel had held a significant lead until just a few weeks ago, Özdemir performed an impressive late surge. The better-known and more personally popular candidate, he ran a disciplined, pragmatist campaign designed to detoxify the Greens' regulatory image. His bet on consolidating the progressive vote, drawing SPD and Left supporters to back him tactically to block a CDU victory, paid off. Hagel, for his part, gained votes for the CDU but struggled to generate momentum once a controversy over a resurfaced 2018 video, in which he made remarks about underage female pupils, damaged his image as a straightforward, reliable candidate. Some critics had warned that the CDU campaign was too defensive, apparently counting on walking into the state chancellery unopposed.

First analyses suggest that voters' decisions were largely driven by the contest between Özdemir and Hagel rather than by national politics; local, in other words, really did trump global. Also striking is the strong AfD result, which underlines that the party has moved well beyond being an East German phenomenon. In Baden-Württemberg, the AfD's gains are also a reflection of the structural weaknesses of an economy in painful transition: what coal and steel were to the Ruhr Valley, the combustion engine risks becoming to this state. Alongside the AfD result, two other developments stand out. For the first time, the liberal FDP will not be represented in the state parliament, a further sign that the party's national downward trend shows no sign of reversing. And the SPD, junior coalition partner in Berlin, only just scraped over the threshold.

Baden-Württemberg was the first of five important state elections in Germany this year. A CDU win here would have been a significant symbolic signal, confirmation that Merz's government enjoys popular support beyond the Berlin bubble. That signal did not come. Merz can, and will point to regional factors and the particular dynamics of the Özdemir-Hagel contest to deflect responsibility. That argument is not without merit. But the SPD's near-collapse is harder to explain away.

The real problem for Merz does not arrive today, it arrives in two weeks, when Rhineland-Palatinate votes on 22 March. The SPD has governed there continuously since 1991. If it suffers another heavy defeat in its own heartland, existential questions within the party will return with force. A junior coalition partner in an existential crisis is not a stable foundation for a government that still has a long reform agenda to deliver. The coming weeks will test whether Merz's coalition can hold its nerve. The choices narrow: go all-in on reform and force the SPD to either commit or walk, or retreat into managed decline and hope the next election is far enough away. The train is moving. The question is who stays on it.

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