Schroeder’s party on shaky ground after state poll loss

BERLIN, SEPT 20: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats suffered a humiliating electoral defeat on Sunday, finishing third with just 10.7 per cent of the vote in a Saxony state poll, official provisional results said in Dresden on Monday. The result is a fresh blow to Schroeder and his ruling party, already reeling under a string of key electoral defeats after just 11 months in power.

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which has run Saxony — in eastern Germany — since the German reunification in 1990, maintained its majority in the state, with 56.9 per cent of the vote. The CDU is slightly down from its 1994 figures, according to provisional results released by the election commission early today.

Second were the former Communists in the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) with 22.2 per cent of the vote. The 4,80,118 votes they got were more than double Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) polled. In the 1994 vote, the SPD narrowly beat the former Communists for second place.The SPD’s junior partner in Schroeder’s coalition government, the Greens, did not even get the five per cent of votes required to take any seats in state parliament. They finished with just 2.6 percent of the votes cast, behind the far Right party.

The Liberal FDP and the extreme Right also garnered less than three per cent of the vote. The results give the CDU 76 votes in the new state parliament, a drop of one seat.