Woidke's gamble pays off: SPD scrape win in Brandenburg
Monday 23rd September
Good morning.
As he touched down New York ahead of the UN General Assembly, Chancellor Olaf Scholz was met with some welcome news from home. In the state election in Brandenburg the SPD, led by the long-serving, well-liked Minister-President Dietmar Woidke, had scraped their way to a narrow victory in the popular vote against the AfD. Woidke’s gamble — promising to resign if the AfD came first — clearly ‘squeezed’ the traditionally reliable SPD vote in the state sufficiently to stave off an acute crisis for his party and his Chancellor.
But the impression from the press this morning is that this win comes despite, not because, of Olaf Scholz and the federal SPD. As a result, some influential quarters are now calling explicitly for the Chancellor to step aside as SPD leader in favour of a much more popular alternative. More below.
First, the numbers
Several things are striking about these results. First, the SPD’s relatively strong performance potentially masks what is otherwise a drubbing for the ‘mainstream’. The CDU saw a loss of 3.5% on their vote share; the SPD’s partners in the federal government, the Greens and FDP, suffered nothing short of a collapse in their support. The Greens are down from an impressive 15.6% in 2019 to 4.1% today, falling shy of the magic 5% to take seats in Parliament. The FDP, meanwhile, gained only 0.8%: less than half as many votes as an animal rights party.
Like in Saxony and Thuringia, these results mean forming a coalition will require tough choices for the mainstream. Because of the slump in the vote share of both the CDU and Greens, who have governed in the state alongside the SPD since 2019, a Grand Coalition (SPD-CDU) falls 1 seat short of an absolute majority, and will consequently have to rely in part on the BSW, who have so far made a federal stop to arms transfers to Ukraine a precondition of any coalition talks, even on the state level.
Press reaction
Spiegel: ‘The Chancellor’s party won, but the Chancellor himself lost’
In a leader for the magazine, Christoph Hickmann comes out strongly against Scholz. He says that now that the state elections are done, the run-up to next year’s federal election begins in earnest. This should prompt thinking within the SPD about whether Scholz is right for the job. “The alternative,” he suggests, “is obvious”: Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, who has long been the country’s most popular politician by some distance. Pistorius, Hickmann says, would be a tougher opponent for the CDU’s Friedrich Merz, and a more suitable candidate to deal with an unstable international environment (he cites Trump and Ukraine in particular). Granted, he says, Pistorius’ popularity might collapse in the face of all his party’s problems if he took over the leadership. But “Dietmar Woidke has shown how far you can get as a popular politician if you take a risk”.
SZ: ‘Operation: Damage Limitation’
The SZ’s Jan Heidtmann writes up the atmosphere within the SPD last night and reflects on the state campaign as a whole:
“The focus on the duel between the SPD and AfD had an impact on the entire election campaign. It not only meant that the other parties increasingly became onlookers in this dispute. The other effect was that state politics hardly played a role in this election campaign. A phenomenon that had already been observed in Saxony and Thuringia and was even more pronounced here. Brandenburg is doing well economically, for example with companies such as Tesla and the ICE (high-speed rail) maintenance site in Cottbus. But other areas are lagging behind. In schools, in health care in rural areas far away from the conurbation around Berlin. Structural change in the dying brown-coal mining areas in Lusatia is also still in its infancy.
“Dietmar Woidke, for his part, distanced himself as much as possible from the SPD in Berlin and his comrade Chancellor Olaf Scholz. This was one of the reasons why the Social Democrats in Brandenburg will almost certainly remain in the state chancellery in Potsdam. The CDU and the BSW are potential coalition partners. Woidke first announced that he would "definitely talk to the CDU".
‘Election debacle prompts debate within CDU about the right direction’
The SZ also carries an exclusive report that the CDU’s dire performance — especially losing to the BSW — has already sparked an internal debate about the party’s direction, especially on social security, led by Dennis Radtke, the federal chairman of the party’s workers' wing. Radtke has told the paper that the Brandenburg election was “the third election in a row in which anti-system parties received more than 40 per cent support and the third election in a row in which social security issues were the most important topic for voters”. The CDU would therefore be "well advised" to "sharpen its social profile" now.
FAZ: These 5 things helped Dietmar Woidke to victory in Brandenburg
FAZ’s political team in Berlin offers their analysis of the SPD’s success, boiling it down to five key factors:
Woidke’s risky strategy of personalising the fight against the AfD: “Many voters had said in pre-election polls that they were still undecided - a significant number of them probably swung in favour of Woidke in the final metres.”
SPD’s call for tactical voting— ‘us (or more accurately, Woidke) or the AfD’ won out against CDU’s urging for ‘strategic’ voting (‘this election is about so much more than just beating that AfD’)
Non-party-political campaigns for tactical voting against the AfD helped the SPD
"Shredding" the small parties: the two-horse-race rhetoric dried up the loss of votes to small parties. "Dietmar Woidke has shredded the Left with his right-wing panic campaign," Die Linke’s top candidate, Sebastian Walter, told the F.A.Z. newspaper.
The timing of the election: FAZ’s correspondents ponder whether the result in Brandenburg would have been different if it was held on the same day as those in Saxony and Thuringia. The shock of those results compounded both interest and alarm about the AfD, and aided the SPD’s campaign.