After a series of disappointing elections, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) finally has something to celebrate after winning elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg on Sunday.
On Monday, Scholz was scheduled to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in New York.
He is also likely to comment extensively on the Brandenburg election, where his party came in first. For much of the summer, opinion polls had shown the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leading in Brandenburg. But while the AfD made gains in Sunday’s election, it failed to overtake the SPD.
In a record turnout, voters in Brandenburg gave the SPD a vote of almost 31%, according to preliminary results. That is an increase of almost five percentage points compared to the SPD’s result in the most recent state elections in 2019.
There was probably a sigh of relief in New York, where Scholz attended a UN summit on Sunday and met other world leaders.
The beleaguered and unpopular Scholz faces questions about whether he should continue to lead his party into the September 2025 federal parliamentary elections. A defeat in Brandenburg, where the SPD has been in power since 1990, would have added to the pressure.
But Scholz will likely only get a short reprieve from Sunday’s vote.
The hero of the evening for the SPD was the popular, long-serving Brandenburg premier, Dietmar Woidke. He explicitly distanced himself from Scholz before the election and refused the chancellor’s support during the campaign.
Woidke turned the election into a referendum on his own popularity and promised to resign if his party did not win.
And this while Scholz lives in the capital of Brandenburg, Potsdam, just outside Berlin.
