(Adnkronos) – “The solutions are not found at the margins but in the center, with useful answers for our economy, on the issue of migrants and security”: Friedrich Merz welcomed the result (33.3% against 34.3% in 2020) obtained by his CDU in the local vote held in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, the first electoral test for his CDU/CSU-SPD coalition. Merz spoke of a percentage result – 33% – with which his party “clearly” emerges as the main force, which manages problems with determination. However, the vote also marked the advance of the AfD, Alternative for Germany, which tripled its results, jumping from 5.1 in 2020 to 14.5.
The AfD placed third, behind the SPD (22.1%, 24.3 in 2020), a result that, however, does not allow the Social Democratic leader of the Land, Armin Post, to claim victory: “We must describe the results exactly for what they are: this is a poor result for the SPD, but also for the democratic establishment,” he told ZDF. The Greens fell below the AfD, at 13.5% (2020 20%). For Post, the vote demonstrates the need for the parties of the political center to “work together to ensure that the AfD becomes a small party again”.
“The most important thing for me is that the federal government returns to the spirit of the coalition negotiations, where we discussed the issues thoroughly, but then we made a decision and started implementing the decisions,” said the SPD official. Meanwhile, the AfD continued to celebrate the outcome of the vote. “We have now clearly demonstrated that we are a popular party,” AfD parliamentary director Bernd Baumann told reporters in Berlin.
