The outcome of the Sunday, Oct. 8 elections for state parliaments in Bavaria and Hesse was a strong vote against the Federal government, the three parties of which were losers, with the Free Democrats even voted out of Bavaria’s Parliament. In Hesse, the Christian Democrats had a landslide, taking 52 of the 55 election districts.
More than Bavaria, Hesse was a battlefield on the federal aspect, because the Social Democrats’ top candidate was Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, whose party plunged to an all-time low, receiving only 15.1% of the vote. In Hesse, the Greens are down to 14.8%, a drop of 5%, against their vote of 19.8% in the 2018 elections. The Free Democrats are down to 5% (against 7.5% in 2018), with only a couple of hundred votes bringing it back into the Parliament. The winners in Hesse were a) the governing Christian Democrats with 34.6%, an improvement by 7.6% over 2018; b) the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which improved by 5% against 2018 of 13.4%, to now 18.4%, which made it the second-strongest in the state.
In Bavaria, the governing Christian Social Union won with 37%, followed by the Free Voters, their coalition partner, which received 15.8%, and the AfD party as the third-strongest. The last two improved by 5% against the last elections. Also here, the three Federal coalition parties were the losers: the Greens down to 14.4%, the Social Democrats down to 8.4%, the Free Democrats down to 3.0%, which kicked them out of the Parliament.
The formation of the new state governments will likely be the continuation of the incumbent coalitions: Christian Democrats and Greens in Hesse, Christian Social Union and Free Voters in Bavaria. Other parties have ruled out any coalition with the Alternative for Germany. A government in Hesse could also be formed between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats—the interesting question then being whether outgoing Minister President of the Christian Democrats Boris Rhein would put the nuclear power issue on his agenda, which he could hardly do with the Greens in his coalition. During a high-profile pre-election debate organized by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Rhein endorsed a return to nuclear power and also called for development of thermonuclear fusion—would the Hesse Social Democrats, which would have to make major concessions to Rhein to enter a new government led by him agree, against the views of the SPD national executive and naturally against the Federal government and its SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz? He just recently rejected all initiatives for nuclear power with the remark: “Nuclear power is a dead horse.”
