Enlarge image
Many voters switched from the CDU and Left Party to the SPD
Photo: DER SPIEGEL
The SPD triumphs in the state elections in Saarland, the CDU has crashed.
The clear result of the Social Democrats with an increase in votes of around 14 percentage points and the debacle of the CDU - a minus of around twelve points - are directly related.
The state election is marked by major shifts: tens of thousands of voters who voted for the CDU or the left five years ago this time opted for the SPD of state leader Anke Rehlinger.
This emerges from the analysis of voter migration by Infratest dimap.
The election research institute calculates them on the basis of its own surveys, the provisional final result and other official statistics.
The values are a rough estimate of how many voters a party was able to retain compared to the previous election and how many migrated to and from other parties.
The
SPD
therefore benefited above all from voters who turned their backs on the CDU and Prime Minister Tobias Hans.
38,000 of them voted for the SPD, only 6,000 voters switched in the opposite direction.
The second major migration is 18,000 people who once voted for the Left and now switched to the Social Democrats.
There was no significant migration from the Social Democrats SPD to other parties.
Therefore, the SPD comes to 43.5 percent and thus has the absolute majority of seats in the Saarbrücken state parliament.
The
CDU
not only lost to the SPD on a grand scale.
The drop in voter turnout was also particularly noticeable among the Christian Democrats: 25,000 of their former voters stayed at home this time.
In addition, there are smaller migrations to the other parties.
12.2 percentage points less than in the 2017 election meant a historically weak result of 28.5 percent.
The
left
also lost to both the SPD (18,000) and the non-voter camp (13,000).
The 9,000 people who chose one of the smallest parties instead of the left this time are also striking.
In total, the left fell by more than ten points to 2.6 percent and thus flies out of the state parliament - in the federal state in which it once achieved double-digit results.
According to Infratest dimap,
the
AfD also lost significantly to the group of non-voters.
After slight losses, it remains represented in the state parliament with 5.7 percent.
The
Greens
improved by almost one percentage point compared to 2017, but according to the preliminary result they fell just short of the five percent hurdle.
The party did not succeed in sufficiently compensating for migration in different directions.
The
FDP
was able to convince a few former CDU voters, gained 1.5 points, but missed entering the state parliament with 4.8 percent.
The shifts between SPD and CDU are particularly large among
older voters.
This is the result of the post-election survey by Infratest dimap.
The SPD gained the most voters among those over 60 and the least among the youngest group of voters aged 18 to 24.
The CDU lost a particularly large number of voters among the over 45-year-olds, in percentage terms the most among those over 70 years of age.
In this group, 16 percentage points less voted for the CDU than in the last state election.
Greens and FDP strong among first-time voters
Overall, the results of the two major parties among older voters are significantly higher than their respective results among the general population: among the over 70-year-olds, the SPD came to 49 percent and the CDU to 38 percent.
In the 18 to 24 age group, the result for the SPD was 32 percent and for the CDU 19 percent.
If only the
first-time voters
had decided on the composition of the state parliament, the Greens and FDP would have moved in significantly.
Both parties achieved a disproportionately large number of votes in this group with eleven percent.
Broken down by
gender
, the SPD did slightly better for women than for men, 45 percent versus 42 percent.
This also applies to the CDU, which achieved 30 percent of the votes for women and 27 percent for men.
FDP and AfD got more votes from men than from women.
The Greens, FDP and Left, all of whom failed to make it into the state parliament, fared better among highly educated
voters
.
The SPD, on the other hand, achieved significantly more approval in the group of people with a simple education than in those with a high level of education.
In the case of the CDU, the proportion of votes in both groups is about the same.
The AfD was elected more by voters with a lower level of education.
In the group of voters who live in a
bad economic situation
, the SPD achieved a share of the vote of 35 percent, the CDU 23 percent.
What is striking here is the result of the AfD, which according to Infratest dimap comes to 16 percent in this group - almost three times as much as their total share of the vote of 5.7 percent.
