The German Greens Party has narrowly won the state parliament elections in the populous state of Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany.
According to the preliminary final result the eco left-wingers received 30.2 per cent of the vote – topping the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) by 0.5 percentage points.
The loss is especially painful for the CDU because itt had been leading in the polls for months and had harboured high hopes of “turning” Baden-Württemberg after five years of a Greens-CDU coalition.
The right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) came in third with 18.8 per cent – scoring the biggest gains of all parties and almost doubling its share of the vote compared to the last election in 2021.
BADEN-WÜRTTEMBERG | Vorläufiges Endergebnis der Landtagswahl
GRÜNE: 30,2% (-2,4)
CDU: 29,7% (+5,6)
AfD: 18,8% (+9,1)
SPD: 5,5% (-5,5)
LINKE: 4,4% (+0,8)
FDP: 4,4% (-6,1)
FW: 1,9% (-1,1)
BSW: 1,4% (NEU)
Sonstige: 3,7% (-1,8)Änderungen zum Wahlergebnis von 2021#ltwbw pic.twitter.com/N7BLoBIKOj
— Deutschland Wählt (@Wahlen_DE) March 9, 2026
The Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Liberals (FDP) were soundly beaten. The SPD lost 5.5 percentage points to take 5.5 per cent of the vote – its worst result ever at a German state election.
The FDP did worse, losing 6.1 percentage points down to 4.4 per cent – thus missing the 5-per-cent-threshold necessary to make it into parliament.
Both parties have managed to alienate their former key voter demographics. Many workers in the important industrial state who would have once voted for SPD are now voting for AfD instead.
The FDP bled voters to AfD and CDU after adopting many left-wing talking points and policies that did not sit well with its Libertarian roots.
A right-wing coalition of CDU and AfD would have a comfortable majority in Baden-Württemberg’s parliament in Stuttgart.
The CDU, though, has already announced that it will uphold the cordon sanitaire (banning any co-operation with AfD) and will opt to become the junior partner of the Greens for another term.
Publicist Julian Reichelt criticised the CDU for the decision, writing on X: “Baden-Württemberg has voted for a Black-Blue coalition [CDU and AfD], but thanks to the CDU it will receive Green-Black.
“You do not need to be a prophet to recognise that the State will not survive another five years of this ideological, planned economy policy of horror.”
The future state prime minister will now in all likelihood be Greens Party leader Cem Özdemir. The son of Turkish immigrants is a former kindergarten teacher who joined the Greens in 1981.
Baden-Württemberg is one of Germany’s key industrial regions and a cornerstone of the German automobile sector with Mercedes-Benz and Porsche both headquartered in the Stuttgart region.
The state has been hard hit, though, by Germany’s ongoing economic malaise, exacerbated by Greens-influenced policies such as the nuclear phase-out which has driven up energy prices.
Unemployment has risen from 3.5 per cent in 2022 to 4.8 per cent in 2026, with no improvement in sight.
