Losses for German governing parties in European elections
Published: Sunday, Jun 9th 2024, 18:30
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In Germany, the parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz's "traffic light" coalition lost votes in the European elections, in some cases significantly. According to initial forecasts by television stations ARD and ZDF, the opposition Christian Democrats were by far the strongest party.
According to these forecasts, the CDU/CSU received 29.5% to 30% of the vote across Germany (2019: 28.9%). The right-wing populist AfD was the second strongest force with 16 to 16.5% (2019: 11.0), its best result to date at national level.
Scholz's Social Democrats slipped to 14% (2019: 15.8%), their weakest result in Germany to date. The Greens fell to between 12 and 12.5 percent (2019: 20.5), while the Liberals (FDP), which also governed in the "traffic light" coalition, roughly maintained their weak result from 2019 (5.4) with 5 percent.
The new left-wing populist alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), founded in January, achieved 5.5 to 6 percent in its first election.
Compared to the 2021 federal election, the chancellor's party, the SPD, lost more than ten percentage points. Scholz's "traffic light" coalition therefore has less than a third of the vote just over a year before the next general election.
The most populous EU country accounts for 96 of the 720 seats in the EU Parliament. 60.9 million Germans were eligible to vote and, according to the Federal Returning Officer, around 4.1 million citizens of other EU countries were also allowed to vote in Germany. The voting age had been lowered to 16. In contrast to Bundestag elections, there is no blocking clause for EU elections in Germany.
©Keystone/SDA
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