GERMANY’S Social Democrats (SPD) defeated Angela Merkel’s conservatives in a vote in the northern state of Lower Saxony on Sunday in a setback to the chancellor as she prepares for tricky three-way coalition talks at the national level this week.
The SPD, which has governed the swing state home to carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) with the Greens for four years, won 37.5 percent, well up from 32.6 percent in the last election there in 2013, according to an exit poll from infrared dimap.
The exit poll from the rich agricultural state with around six million eligible voters showed Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) took 35 percent of the vote, down from 36 percent in the last election there in 2013.
Disgruntled with Merkel’s liberal migrant policy, Germans abandoned her party in droves in September’s national election to hand the conservatives their worst result since 1949.
If confirmed, Sunday’s result would be the poorest showing for the CDU in Lower Saxony in 58 years, further weakening Merkel as she tries to piece together an awkward alliance with the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP) and environmentalist Greens.
Those parties will this week begin discussions about entering a marriage of convenience untested at the federal level that could drag into 2018.
Simon Fink, the political scientist at the University of Goettingen, said no one had dared to start coalition negotiations in Berlin ahead of the election in Lower Saxony, which is slightly bigger than the Netherlands.
“Everyone was scared that if they did something at the national level or committed themselves to something, then their colleagues in Lower Saxony could end up suffering,” he said.
The exit poll showed the environmentalist Greens, currently, junior coalition partner to the SPD in Lower Saxony won 8.5 per cent.
The liberal Free Democrats (FDP) won 7 percent and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) cleared the 5-percent threshold to enter parliament with 5.5 per cent.
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