The German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left party has passed its first electoral test since entering government, after the Social Democratic party secured a rare absolute majority at Saarland state elections.
Led by Anke Rehlinger, a trained lawyer and former shot putter, the SPD won 43.5% of Sunday’s vote in the small state on the French border.
“That’s not just a narrow majority,” she told the broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “That’s quite a significant majority with 29 seats.” The result could in theory mean the first single-party government in the Saarland since 1970, a rarity in Germany’s increasingly fragmented political landscape.
The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has governed in the Saarland continuously since 1999, suffered a major defeat, dropping 12 percentage points.
The state’s premier, Tobias Hans, signalled his resignation on Sunday night, saying there would be “personal consequences” from the result.
While the CDU’s polling figures have rallied at a national level after the combative Friedrich Merz took over the party following a historic defeat at federal elections last September, the Saarland result suggests there may be more to the centre-left’s revival than good fortune.
The SDP performed particularly strongly among usually conservative-voting over-60s, 50% of whom voted centre-left this time around, and also gained a significant number of votes from former supporters of Die Linke.
Saarland was once seen as one of the few strongholds of the leftwing party in western Germany, with 21.3% of the vote being achieved as recently as 2009. However, on Sunday it secured just 2.6%, a fall of more than 10 percentage points that meant an exit from the state parliament.
The election came just weeks after Oskar Lafontaine, a former SPD state premier in the region who had gone on to co-found Die Linke, rescinded his party membership, citing the new leadership’s support for exporting lethal weapons to Ukraine.
The Green party and the liberal Free Democratic party, which both govern in a coalition with the SPD at federal level, made minor gains in Sunday’s vote but narrowly failed to reach the electoral threshold for parliamentary representation.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which made small losses but won 5.7% of the vote, will be the smallest of three parties in the next state parliament.
The durability of the SPD’s revival will be tested more strenuously at state elections in the CDU-led Schleswig-Holstein on 8 May and the populous North-Rhine Westphalia on 15 May.
