Voter migration in North Rhine-Westphalia: This is how the Greens and CDU came to victory

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Hundreds of thousands of voters voted differently this time than in 2017.

Photo: DER SPIEGEL

The clear winners of the state elections are the Christian Democrats led by Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst and the Greens with their top candidate Mona Neubaur (read more about them here).

The SPD and its frontman Thomas Kuschaty, on the other hand, are the losers together with the FDP.

• According to the preliminary official result, the

  CDU

  came to 35.7 percent (2017: 33.0).

• The

  SPD

  slipped to 26.7 percent (2017: 31.2).

• The Greens

  came in third

  with 18.2 percent, almost tripling their 2017 result (6.4).

• The

  FDP

  lost more than ever in an NRW election, only achieving 5.9 percent (2017: 12.6).

• The

  AfD

  deteriorated to 5.4 percent (2017: 7.4).

• The Left

  failed again, only getting 2.1 percent (2017: 4.9).

Underlying the results are major shifts in the electorate.

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.

FDP loses to CDU

The

has therefore snatched many votes from the FDP in particular.

Five years ago, 300,000 of the CDU voters made their cross with the Liberals.

Around every fourth FDP voter (28.3 percent) in 2017 migrated to the Union.

That was ultimately the

's undoing.

It has not succeeded in attracting significant new supporters from other parties.

This becomes particularly clear in the flow of voters between the Liberals and the Greens: around one in ten FDP voters from 2017 now voted for the Greens.

From the Greens to the FDP, on the other hand, there was practically no migration.

Like no other party, the

have succeeded in attracting a broad mass of new voters from their competitors, and not just from the left-wing camp.

The biggest gains came from the SPD (300,000 new voters), but the CDU (160,000) and FDP (100,000) also had to let many of their voters go to the Greens.

In addition to their losses to the Greens, the SPD's main downfall was that 390,000 (14.7 percent) of their supporters from 2017 did not vote this

time

Losses that the Social Democrats could not compensate.

The

also lost mainly to the group of non-voters (180,000) without being able to win any new voters worth mentioning.

The youth choose green

Another reason for the Green Party's strong performance is that around one in 10 of its voters was a

voter .

In general, support for the Greens is highest among the younger sections of the population, as an analysis of

shows.

In contrast, the CDU and SPD achieved their best results in the older population groups.

The FDP also performs comparatively well in younger voter groups.

The 13 percent among 18 to 24-year-olds is more than twice as high as their election result (5.9 percent).

There are also strong differences between the parties

when considering

While the SPD was particularly popular among people with a simple education, the Greens and FDP performed well among people with a high level of education.

The CDU scored in both groups.

When it

, the voting shares of the parties among women and men are roughly the same.

According to Infratest dimap, the FDP and AfD tended to perform slightly better among men than among women.

However, these small differences are subject to statistical uncertainty.