If there was any need to prove how much each vote counts, Lars Rohwer should have provided it on Sunday evening. The CDU direct candidate in constituency 160, which includes part of the city of Dresden and half of the Bautzen district, won the mandate at midnight with a wafer-thin lead of 39 votes over the AfD applicant Andreas Harlaß. The latter had initially been clearly in the lead, as the rural communities were quickly counted, but when the election offices of the state capital gradually reported their results, Rohwer pushed himself forward voice by voice. And yet the overall result of this federal election is an extremely bitter one for the Union in the Free State: it was only able to win four of the 16 constituencies on Sunday, fewer than ever since 1990. The SPD won a direct mandate in Chemnitz,the left one in Leipzig, but the rest of the country turned light blue from the beginning of the count and remained so until the end. With 24.6 percent, the AfD won the most votes in a federal election for the second time after 2017 (27 percent) in Saxony.
Stefan Locke
Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.
Follow I follow
The gap to the CDU, which four years ago was 0.1 percentage points, this time has grown to more than seven percentage points; The Union, the top dog in Saxony for decades, only comes in third place with 17.2 percent, because the SPD also got in between with 19.3 percent. The Social Democrats, like the Greens and FDP, have won votes, while not only the CDU, but also the AfD has lost in Saxony, similar to around two and a half percent nationwide. As was already evident in the state elections two years ago, the alternative has evidently exhausted its potential, which is around a quarter of the votes. The strength of the AfD in Saxony in this federal election is mainly due to the weakness of the others, especially the Union, which clearly won the state elections in 2019.However, it is a phenomenon that can also be observed in other federal states, such as recently in Saxony-Anhalt, that the voters in state elections strengthen the respective party of the Prime Minister, should the danger threaten that the AfD could come close to the government - which is clearly not the case in federal elections is.
Something similar can be observed in Thuringia, where the AfD became the strongest force for the first time with a gain of 1.3 percentage points with a total of 24 percent. The SPD ended up just behind with 23.4 percent, while the Union only comes in at 16.9 percent, almost twelve points less than four years ago. This is one of the reasons why the AfD succeeded in winning four of the eight direct mandates in East and Central Thuringia, including against Christian Hirte, the CDU state chairman. His predecessor Mike Mohring, on the other hand, was completely unexpectedly defeated by the SPD applicant. In the much-noticed constituency of 196 in southern Thuringia, the SPD candidate and former biathlon Olympic champion Frank Ullrich with 33.6 percent clearly won the direct mandate from the former President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen, who achieved 22.3 percent. At 21The AfD candidate landed just 1 percent in third place. The result shows that the Union's strategy in southern Thuringia to win back votes from the AfD with a right-wing conservative applicant has failed. As early as 2019 in Saxony, where Maaßen appeared in the election campaign for individual CDU applicants, the people vote, then the "original".