Merkel’s party defeated in Germany’s most populous state

PanARMENIAN.Net - Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party was defeated in Germany’s most populous state in an election that helped the Social Democrats tighten their grip on the country’s regional governments, Bloomberg reported.

The SPD, the main opposition party nationally, increased its vote share in May 13 ballot in North Rhine-Westphalia, enabling Prime Minister Hannelore Kraft to return to power at the head of a government with the Greens in the state capital Dusseldorf. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union suffered its worst score since World War II.

The result is a setback for Merkel after she headlined nine campaign rallies in 27 days in North Rhine-Westphalia in a bid to regain the state, the first her CDU lost in 2010 as the debt crisis erupted and voters rebelled against bailing out Greece. The SPD is now in power in 11 of Germany’s 16 states.

North Rhine-Westphalia, with almost a quarter of Germany’s 82 million people and an economy bigger than Switzerland’s, is Merkel’s biggest electoral test this year before the federal election in the fall 2013.

For all her campaign efforts, Merkel’s CDU took 26.3 percent, more than 8 percentage points below its score at the last election in May 2010, preliminary results showed. The outcome “exceeded our worst fears,” said Peter Altmaier, CDU chief whip in the federal parliament in Berlin.

The Social Democrats won with 39.1 percent, an increase of almost 5 points from 2010, while their Green Party allies took 11.3 percent, giving a majority to Kraft’s SPD-Greens coalition that ruled for two years in a minority government in the state.