At 6pm the exit polls will be made public, although we will have to wait until late in the evening or until Monday for the preliminary results of the count, which is expected to be extremely tight.
Polling stations opened this Sunday in the German region of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, where close regional elections are being held in which the far right could wrest first place from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats.
A total of 2.1 million citizens (100,000 of whom are voting for the first time) will be called to the polls, which will remain open from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
At the close, the exit polls will be made public, although we will have to wait until well late at night or even until Monday morning to know the preliminary results of the count, which are expected to be extremely tight.
Brandenburg was until now a fief of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), in regional government since German reunification in 1990, first alone and later as part of various coalitions, led for the past ten years by the popular Dietmar Woidke.
However, the overwhelming rise of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD)which won its first regional elections in Thuringia on September 1 and came second in Saxony, is also reflected in the polls of the last eastern ‘Land’ to vote this year.
According to the latest survey, published on Thursday by public broadcaster ZDF, the AfD could thus come first with 28% of the vote, while the SPD is only one point behind.
The Christian Democrats would come in third place with 14%, followed by the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)a populist breakaway from La Izquierda, with 13%.
In the last election, in 2019, the SPD managed to beat the AfD by a narrow margin of 26.2 out of 23.5 points, while the Christian Democrats and the Greens took third and fourth place with 15.6 and 10.8% of the vote respectively.
With the cordon sanitaire currently in place, the AfD has no real chance of governing, but victory would make it difficult to form a coalition government and, above all, would deal a further blow to Scholz’s already battered executive, whose waning popularity has been affected by the Brandenburg campaign.
This has been developed in a national key, dominated by issues such as binomial security and migration and German support for them Ukraine against the Russian invasion, which according to experts benefits the AfD and the BSW respectively.
Source: EITB
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
