After the election, the Hesse CDU has a choice: it can choose a junior partner to govern. Both the Greens and the SPD have already put themselves in the shop window.
Anyone who knows how power works doesn’t celebrate triumphs for too long. Hesse’s CDU Prime Minister Boris Rhein will be cheered once again on Monday evening in the small Taunus town of Hofheim. But things will quickly get down to business at the meeting of the state party leaders.
With its overwhelming victory in the state elections, the Union has secured the next five years after 25 years of uninterrupted government. Now it’s time for the next move: Who will be your junior partner?
With 34.6 percent, the CDU is by far the strongest party and has achieved its electoral goal: it cannot be governed against and it has free choice. Rhein has announced that it wants to hold exploratory talks with the Greens as its current coalition partner – but also with the SPD and FDP.
FDP is not needed
For the liberals, this is just a nice gesture. The Hessen Union’s ex-favorite partner is too weak for a duet, and he isn’t needed either. The FDP had to tremble for a long time until it barely made it back into the state parliament with 5.0 percent.
The Left trembled unsuccessfully and was thrown out of the state parliament after 15 years: the impression given in Berlin in the party leadership’s dispute with Sarah Wagenknecht of a party in dissolution could not be countered in Wiesbaden.
The CDU’s three exploratory partners are united by the heavy losses they suffered in the election. Prime Minister Rhine had pushed them forward in the election campaign as parties of the unpopular traffic light federal government with the slogan “Course instead of chaos”.
There was no three-way fight
The CDU received more than twice as many votes as the Greens and the SPD. The three-way fight called for by both of them ended up being none. The Greens, with their top candidate Tarek Al-Wazir, the incumbent deputy prime minister and economics minister, ended up with 14.8 percent and only in fourth place.
The SPD in third place with its failed candidate and Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, with 15.1 percent, does not have any more weight to bring into coalition talks. It was a historically disastrous result.
Rhine wants “coalition of the middle”
It is speculation which desired partner the CDU man Rhein was thinking of when he announced a “center coalition” and a course of “soft renewal” on election evening. The fact that he has two alternatives robs his counterparts of room for maneuver.
Both the SPD and the Greens quickly put themselves in the shop window. “We are not in the mood for change,” Al-Wazir pleaded for a continuation of the coalition. Rhein also wants to speak to the Greens first.
Despite recent growing tensions: What speaks for the Greens is that, as a Realo group willing to compromise, they have been a reliable partner of the CDU for ten years.
Rhein has more overlap in content and good personal contacts with the SPD. Their parliamentary group leader Günter Rudolph reminded him after the first projection that the Social Democrats could be relied on in times of need due to the corona pandemic and the energy crisis.
Federal issues dominated in Hesse
Like the FDP, the Greens and the SPD in Wiesbaden can point out that they had no chance given the headwind from Berlin. In fact, the Rhine and the Hessian CDU each had the best survey results when it came to skills. Above all, dissatisfaction with the federal government and federal issues dominated this Hesse election.
The pre-election survey from Infratest dimap on behalf of the ARD shows: The economic situation, climate protection and energy issues as well as asylum and immigration policy were the most important for most voters. Since at the same time more than 70 percent of them generally rate the situation as worrying, the Hesse election was dominated by an underlying mood of worry.
This paid into the account of the CDU and also the AfD, who are in opposition in the Bundestag. For them, according to Darmstadt party researcher Eike-Christian Hornig, the promise to “stop or at least slow down” fearful changes was worth it.
SPD has a lot to work through
The fact that a large majority in Hesse wanted a different asylum policy particularly affected Nancy Faeser, the Federal Minister responsible for this. It also cost her and her party credit that Faeser did not want to return to the state parliament in the event of defeat.
A lot depends on how stable the CDU’s two possible partners appear. Because they first have to come to terms with the election defeats. This will probably cost less energy for the Greens, who got through the election campaign very solidly and without any mishaps.
It is no coincidence that Faeser has already invoked solidarity in the Hesse SPD. She herself is under pressure as a minister, but also as SPD state leader. Party General Secretary Christoph Degen is also threatened with trouble because of an error-filled election campaign. There could even be a tussle for the position of parliamentary group leader.
AfD provides Opposition leader
The AfD has no such worries. 18.4 percent is not only the best result the party has ever achieved in a western German state. As the head of the second strongest force in the state parliament, parliamentary group leader Robert Lambrou can now call himself opposition leader. The number of mandates is even enough to successfully apply for investigative committees without support – for example in the matter of Corona.
The AfD benefited above all from the widespread mood of crisis and criticism of the alleged “mass immigration”. Since entering the state parliament for the first time in 2019, the parliamentary group had worn itself out in serious internal trench warfare.
This was just as indifferent to their voters as the state Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s assessment that the AfD was a right-wing extremist test case. On the contrary: the numbers show how the protest party’s image is deceptive. In Hesse, many voted for the AfD out of conviction.