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Tino Chrupalla, co-head of the AfD, at the announcement of the first projections
Photo: ARMANDO BABANI / AFP
The AfD has to give up its two direct mandates in Baden-Württemberg.
The right-wing populists first moved into the Stuttgart state parliament five years ago.
Two members of the 23-member parliamentary group came as directly elected candidates from Pforzheim and Mannheim.
Now both direct mandates are gone - two Greens have conquered the places.
In
Pforzheim
, the AfD politician Bernd Grimmer had the best result of the AfD nationwide with 24.2 percent in 2016, now he only comes to 15.8 percent in the preliminary result.
In future, the direct mandate will go to the 25-year-old student Felix Herkens.
The Green garnered 26.2 percent of the vote.
There
is also a change
in
Mannheim I.
There, the AfD man Rüdiger Klos had fetched 22.9 percent five years ago, now his successor Robert Schmidt only manages 12.7 percent according to the latest extrapolation.
The clear winner with 27.8 percent of the votes is the green veterinarian Susanne Aschhoff.
The point wins in the two cities are exemplary for the entire state: According to projections, the Greens were able to increase their result by around two percentage points compared to the last state election in 2016 and are now more than 32 percent.
The CDU, on the other hand, fell below 24 percent.
After a loss of around five percentage points, the AfD now ranks around ten, the SPD around 11.5 percent after a slight loss and the FDP around ten percent after growth.
(Click here for the projections from Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate.)
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"Baden-Württemberg and green, green and Baden-Württemberg go well together," said Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann on the evening of the election.
His party had become "by far the strongest party" in the state elections, which he interpreted as "a mandate to form the next government," said the 72-year-old.
So far, Kretschmann ruled with the CDU.
In addition to a continuation of the green-black coalition, a traffic light coalition of the Greens, the FDP and the SPD would also come into question.
AfD leader Jörg Meuthen does not attribute the relatively poor performance of his party to his own mistakes.
The previously relatively unknown top AfD candidates Michael Frisch (Rhineland-Palatinate) and Bernd Gögel (Baden-Württemberg) did not make any mistakes, but rather "had a very good election campaign," Meuthen told the dpa news agency.
On the other hand, he attributes the poor results to his party's conflict with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Even if the court had stopped the protection of the constitution for the time being, "the voters are now associating the AfD with the monitoring of the constitution because of the wide coverage," said Meuthen.
Icon: The mirror
mrc / dpa
