Saar loser

27 March 2017 By Olaf Storbeck

The small state of Saarland backed Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, while the SPD, led by the charismatic Martin Schulz, did less well than expected. Voters may tire of Merkel after 12 years, but seem inclined to prefer her stable, predictable government over the alternative.

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Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union on March 26 won the first of three regional elections ahead of the country’s general election in September. In the Saarland state election, the CDU got 40.7 percent of the votes, 5.5 percentage points more than in 2012 and 4 percentage points to 6 percentage points more than predicted in the most recent opinion polls.

The Social Democrats lost 1 percentage point and got 29.6 percent of the vote. As in the previous five years, both parties are likely to jointly govern the state in a “grand coalition” led by the CDU. The far-left Die Linke slipped 3.3 percentage points to 12.9 percent. The far-right Alternative fuer Deutschland, which ran for the first time in Saarland, secured 6.2 percent of the votes.

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