On Sunday, voters in hundreds of cities, towns and villages across Germany’s most populous state gave Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative party a convincing victory in municipal elections that were watched across the country as a barometer for the national mood.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, nearly tripled its share of the vote from five years ago, when municipal elections were last held in the state, North Rhine-Westphalia, but the party failed to sweep the state as some had feared.
On Sunday night, Mr. Merz’s Christian Democrats scored nearly 35 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results of the races across the state, and the AfD got less than half that, with around 15 percent, in North Rhine-Westphalia, where more than one in five German voters live. Sunday’s municipal elections have no direct effect on national politics, but they were the first electoral test for Mr. Merz since he assumed office in May.
Since Mr. Merz won the national election in February, the AfD has continued to surge in popularity, with national polls showing that a quarter of voters back it. But in North Rhine-Westphalia, where people voted for city councilors, mayors and other regional representatives, they failed to reach the 18 percent that West German voters gave them in February.
But even if a far-right wave did not materialize, it was another sign of the rightward drift of politics in Germany.
“This result should give us pause and should prevent us from resting easy,” Hendrik Wüst, the state’s conservative governor, told reporters, after celebrating his own party’s win.
The center-left Social Democrats, who are the junior partner in Mr. Merz’s government coalition, lost several percentage points of the vote, but managed to stave off the major defeat many had predicted.
The big losers of the night were the Green party, which across the various races lost more than 7 percentage points from five years ago, when it scored its best-ever result in municipal elections in the state..
Here is what to know about the vote on Sunday.
What does this mean for national politics?
Even if there are no direct consequences from the election, the results in the west on Sunday should help Mr. Merz in Berlin on Monday.
Mr. Merz’s conservative party traditionally performs well in rural areas, small towns and villages. But support in these areas is mostly based on the records of local politicians, meaning that Mr. Merz’s policies, such as trying to curb migration, reboot the economy or rebuild the army, could have been less important to voters than more local issues.
For the Social Democrats, Sunday’s election results hurt, but perhaps not as badly as some in the party had feared.
“It is true that we were unable to stop the downward trend,” said Bärbel Bas, the Social Democratic minister of labor, who comes from North Rhine-Westphalia and who had spent some time campaigning there. However, the party did better than its current national support would have indicated: winning 22 percent of the votes in the state, according to preliminary results, compared with the 15 percent it is currently polling at nationally.
How did the AfD fare?
While the far-right sweep that many in party had hoped for did not materialize, the party did score around 15 percent of the votes across the state, according to preliminary results. Several of its mayoral candidates in the old industrial center of the Ruhr Valley also qualified for runoff elections, to be held in two weeks.
“The AfD benefits from the weakness of the SPD,” said Andreas Blätte, a political scientist at the University Duisburg-Essen, referring to the Social Democrats.
Why are the results in one city getting so much attention?
Gelsenkirchen, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia that used to be a center of heavy industry and coal mining, is one of the places where the AfD did well.
The city has high unemployment and poverty and a big immigrant community. Many voters there are fed up with the Social Democrats, who have been running Gelsenkirchen for the past 15 years.
“I could see, given the mood and the fact that people are ready to teach someone a lesson, that the AfD could do quite well,” Jörg Pfnister, who runs a small wine bar at an outdoor market where locals meet every Wednesday evening, said ahead of the vote.
Mr. Pfnister, who used to work at the nearby Opel car factory, said he saw the city’s downtown dying out as people forgo the more expensive shopping there for discount or migrant-run supermarkets at city’s peripheries.
Norbert Emmerich, a financial adviser and a member of the Gelsenkirchen City Council who is the AfD’s candidate for mayor, did not beat the Social Democratic candidate, but with nearly 30 percent of the vote, he did make it into the runoff, which will be held in several cities across the state in two weeks.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
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