(Bloomberg) — Germany’s conservatives are heading for defeat in Sunday’s Hamburg regional vote just one week after leader Friedrich Merz’s victory over Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats in the national election.
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Scholz’s center-left SPD party has ruled the northern port city for most of the 80 years since the end of World War II — including under Scholz between 2011 and 2018.
A poll published Thursday suggested the current SPD mayor, Peter Tschentscher, will win with 33% and should be able to continue governing in a coalition with the Greens as junior partners.
They’re in third place at 17%, just one point behind Merz’s center-right Christian Democrats, according to the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen survey for public broadcaster ZDF. The far-right Alternative for Germany, which came second in the national election, is at 9%, the Left party at 12%.
While support for the SPD looks likely to weaken compared with almost 40% at the last regional ballot in 2020, it still shows there are relatively strong pockets of support for the party in some parts of Germany after it crashed last weekend to its worst nationwide result since the war.
It only managed 16%, dropping to third place behind the AfD on 21%, but will likely still end up in Merz’s government as a junior partner.
Merz wants his administration in place by mid-April, and conservative and Social Democrat officials met for a first round of exploratory talks in Berlin on Friday.
In a brief joint statement, the CDU/CSU and SPD general secretaries said “discussions began in an open and constructive atmosphere” and they had agreed to meet again this week.
Finance Minister Joerg Kukies gave an overview of Germany’s fiscal outlook at Friday’s meeting, and the budgetary challenges facing Europe’s biggest economy “will now be the subject of further discussions,” according to the statement.
The Hamburg SPD benefits from a strong personal approval rating for Tschentscher. Among the 1,046 voters polled for ZDF, 51% said they favored him as mayor.
The lead candidate for the Greens, Katharina Fegebank, scored 14% and the CDU’s Dennis Thering 15%.
Polls opened at 8 a.m. local time and the first exit—poll results are due to be published at 6 p.m. The city — one of Germany’s 16 federal states represented in the upper house of parliament, or Bundesrat, in Berlin — has about 1.3 million eligible voters. Turnout in 2020 was 63%.
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