“What a tremendous comeback!” Özdemir told his cheering supporters after polls closed. The Greens’ victory was due largely to the centrist Özdemir’s popularity with voters, surveys indicated.
The vote in Baden-Württemberg is the first of five state elections and numerous local contests across the country over the next several months in what Germans are calling a Superwahljahr (“super election year”). The votes are widely seen as a key test of the national mood as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party seeks to overtake Merz’s conservatives and secure big victories in two eastern states in September.
Özdemir is now set to replace the popular Green premier Winfried Kretschmann, 77, who had decided not to seek another term. CDU leaders had hoped Kretschmann’s departure would allow them to recapture the state from the Greens, which was a conservative stronghold before Kretschmann came to power in 2011.
The CDU’s top candidate, Manuel Hagel, 37, came under criticism after a 2018 video of him making comments about a visit to a high school class surfaced during the campaign in which he said there were “worse places” for a young lawmaker to be than a class made of 80 percent girls. Hagel’s allies depicted the video, which was posted by a Green Party lawmaker, as part of a smear campaign.
In a campaign dominated by concerns over the decline of the state’s vaunted car industry, however, the AfD emerged as the biggest winner of the night in terms of the vote share gained, finishing a strong third with 18.7 percent, according to preliminary results, nearly doubling its support.
The far-right party leveraged rising economic grievances and growing discontent among workers in the manufacturing sector to make the state one of its strongest bases of support in western part of the country, outside its traditional bastions in the former East Germany.