A red-red-green coalition has ruled Berlin since 2016.
But in the elections to the House of Representatives on Sunday, the three coalition parties received very different votes from voters: While the SPD, with 21.4 percent of the votes, remained almost as strong as five years ago (minus 0.1 points), the Greens won around Add three and a half percentage points and come to 18.9 percent.
The left, on the other hand, lost about one and a half points and is now 14.0 percent.
It is noticeable that a significantly larger proportion of its voters in 2016 remained loyal to the SPD than the Greens or Leftists.
While 53.1 percent of the SPD votes from then also ended up with the Social Democrats in 2021, only 24.6 percent of those who voted on the left and 31.5 percent of those who voted for the green remained loyal to their party at the time.
This emerges from the analysis of the voter migration by Infratest dimap.
The election research institute calculates them on the basis of its own surveys and official statistics.
The values are a rough estimate of how many voters a party was able to hold compared to the previous election and how many emigrated or immigrated to and from other parties.
The
SPD
wants to replace its outgoing mayor Michael Müller with Franziska Giffey. Compared to 2016, the Social Democrats lost 37,000 votes to the Greens. In return, the SPD won 31,000 votes from the CDU, while 24,000 SPD voters emigrated. The SPD gained the greatest gain from the camp of non-voters: 55,000 eligible voters who had not voted in 2016 now voted for the SPD.
The
Greens
owe their significant gains
with top candidate Bettina Jarasch, among other things, to strong voter migration between left and green: 88,000 left-wing votes from 2016 went to the Greens this time, while only 79,000 votes went in the other direction. Tactical motives may have played a role here as there. In contrast, the success of the first-time voters for the Greens is clear: with 22,000 votes, they were ahead of this group of voters (ahead of the SPD with 17,000 and the left with 16,000 votes from people who were allowed to vote for the first time).
The
Left Party
was only able to keep 63,000 of its 256,000 voters from 2016, it lost votes to both previous coalition partners - in addition to the negative balance compared with the Greens, there is also an emigration of 26,000 voters to the SPD.
The
AfD
suffered
even heavier losses
- compared to the 2016 parliamentary elections, its share of the vote was almost halved to 8.0 percent.
On the one hand, the
CDU,
under its top candidate Kai Wegner
, has apparently
succeeded in convincing 29,000 former AfD voters.
A relatively strong flow of voters to the
others
(19,000 votes) was also partly responsible
for the minus of 6.2 percentage points for the AfD
.
Overall, the joy of experimenting with the so-called "others" was particularly great among younger voters: 22 percent of the 18-24 year olds voted for a party that was not previously represented in the House of Representatives (and will not be in the future).
Among others, Die Basis (1.3 percent of the second votes), Team Todenhöfer (1.0 percent) and the Free Voters (0.8 percent) ran for the first time for the House of Representatives.
The Animal Welfare Party (2.2 percent), the satirical group The Party (1.8 percent) and Volt (1.1 percent) received larger shares of the vote in the general population.
The Greens with 24 percent and the Left Party with 19 percent were also strong among the young electorate.
Five years ago the SPD was still ahead in this age group with 19 percent, with the top candidate Giffey it only achieved 11 percent here.
On the other hand, the SPD was clearly in the front among the over 60s with 33 percent, and the CDU also has its largest share here (27 percent).
While the FDP tended to score with the younger ones, the Greens are strongest among the 25-44 year olds.
The AfD still finds most support in the 35 to 59 age group.
An
analysis of the voting decision based on
gender
reveals a familiar picture: women mostly vote for the Greens and the SPD, while men tend to vote for the AfD, FDP and CDU.
There is a greater gap between the results according to the
level of education
.
It is noticeable here that the Greens had little success with the rather simply educated electorate: only 4 percent of this group voted for them.
The SPD, on the other hand, was all the stronger: 35 percent of the simply educated is a strong increase compared to the election five years ago.
The situation is reversed among the highly educated electorate: While the SPD and Greens were equally strong in this area in 2016, this time the Greens overtook the SPD (19 percent) with 26 percent.