The SPD is again the strongest party in Bremen. The CDU did not succeed in repeating the surprise of 2019 in the citizenship election on Sunday and getting ahead of the Social Democrats again. Mayor Andreas Bovenschulte (SPD) can now decide whether to continue the coalition with the Greens and Left, which has been in power for four years, or govern with the second-placed CDU.
According to the first ZDF forecast after the polling stations closed at 6 p.m., the SPD came to 30 percent, a clear increase compared to 2019, when it landed at 24.9 percent. It was by far the worst result for the party in Bremen since 1947.
Bovenschulte’s result on Sunday is the second worst. The 57-year-old was elected mayor of Bremen in 2019 because his predecessor Carsten Sieling resigned because of the election disaster.
Well below expectations
With twelve percent of the votes, the Greens, led by Environment Senator Maike Schaefer, fell well short of expectations. In surveys they had meanwhile been more than 20 percent, four years ago it was 17.4 percent. It is initially unclear whether the heavily disputed building energy law by Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck led to the slump or a general discord, especially among left-wing Greens voters.
The latter is supported by the fact that the weakness of the Greens seems to benefit primarily the left – they achieve eleven percent and can thus roughly match the result of 2019. In the meantime, the party, which was shaken by the crisis at the federal level, was well below it in polls.
The CDU comes to 24.5 percent and thus remains well below their result from 2019 (26.7 percent). The top candidate was the President of the Bremen Parliament, Frank Imhoff. The slippage in voting shares and falling behind the SPD means a damper for the CDU party leadership around Friedrich Merz, which is trying to use the dispute in the traffic light coalition to expand its nationwide lead.
The FDP has another particularly exciting election evening ahead of them: According to the forecast, it is unclear whether they will make it over the five percent hurdle. If it fails, it would be the fourth time since joining the federal traffic light coalition at the end of 2021 that the party has not made it into parliament in a state election. It had previously failed in Saarland, Lower Saxony and Berlin.
Since the AfD was not allowed to vote due to formal errors in the list, the party “Bürger in Wut”, which had previously been active mainly in Bremerhaven, was able to attract the right-wing votes and achieved a share of the vote of 10.5 percent.
