NEW DELHI: Two German states are heading to the polls on Sunday, halfway through Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s unpopular national government, with polls showing the centre-right opposition far ahead and Germany’s interior minister set to become governor of his home region. Facing a tough struggle. ,
About 9.4 million people are eligible to vote for the new state legislature in Bavaria and about 4.3 million in neighboring Hesse, a region that also includes Germany’s financial capital, Frankfurt.
Both states are led by the country’s main opposition union bloc, made up of the Christian Democratic Union and the Bavaria-only Christian Social Union.
The result could increase tensions in Scholz’s three-party coalition, which has become notorious for infighting, and could indicate who might challenge Scholz in the 2025 national election.
Polls indicate that the CSU, which has led Bavaria since 1957, is leading that campaign – albeit with less than 40 percent support, by its historical standards.
In Hesse, they gave the CDU a double-digit lead in a three-way contest for the governor’s office between the Conservative Party, Scholz’s centre-left Social Democrats and the environmentalist Greens.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has slipped to second place behind the Union in national elections, will not be a factor in determining the new governments of Bavaria or Hesse because other parties refuse to work with it. But they will keep an eye on whether it significantly improves on the double-digit performance from five years ago.
The three national ruling parties – the Social Democrats, the Greens and the pro-business Free Democrats – will not fare well on Sunday because people “don’t have confidence in being able to solve problems in the country,” prominent political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte told Welt Am. Sontag told the newspaper.
“It has to do with different types of crises as well as communication,” he said. “The situation would be different if the (coalition) partners explained better what they are doing and why, if they worked more closely together.”
Voters have been turned off by repeated public fights, particularly over plans to replace fossil-fuel heating systems with greener alternatives. Polls show the Free Democrats may struggle to gain the 5 percent support needed to keep their places in the two state legislatures on Sunday; The party’s failures in previous elections have increased tensions in the national government.
Scholz’s government also faces intense pressure to reduce the number of migrants arriving, a key issue ahead of the elections.
If Interior Minister Nancy Fesser becomes governor of Hesse, Scholz will have to find someone new to lead her government’s response to that issue, but it appears unlikely that she would replace the CDU’s 24-year-old in that post. Will end the hold. Green challenger Tarek Al-Wazir, currently deputy governor to conservative incumbent Boris Rhine, also faces an uphill battle.
In Bavaria, Governor Markus Soeder is calling on voters to support “continuity and stability.”
He has bet on continuing his current coalition with the Free Voters, a conservative party that is strong locally but is not represented in the national parliament.
Soeder decided last month to retain that party’s leader, Hubert Aivanger, as his vice-governor, despite the uproar sparked by allegations – which Aivanger has denied – that when he came to power 35 years ago He was responsible for an anti-Semitic flyer when he was a schoolboy.
Soeder is widely considered a potential candidate to challenge Scholz in 2025, although he has denied such ambitions. A respectable result on Sunday will underline their position.
