AP News, May 14th, 2007
Germany's center-left Social Democrats won an election in the country's smallest state Sunday, a result that left them to choose whether to end a regional "grand coalition" which mirrors the national government.
While the Social Democrats, or SPD, maintained their decades-long hold on the northwestern city-state of Bremen, it was not an entirely satisfying victory for a party that is struggling nationally.
Both Germany's governing parties shed votes compared with the last state election in 2003. There were gains for the opposition Greens and success for the new Left Party, which entered a state parliament in former West Germany for the first time.
The SPD won 36.8 percent of the vote, down from 42.3 percent four years ago, according to final official results. The Christian Democratic Union declined to 25.7 percent from 29.8 percent.
The Greens scored 16.4 percent, while the Left Party took 8.4 percent and the business-friendly Free Democrats 6 percent.
The SPD won 33 seats, the CDU 23 and the Greens 14, with seven going to the Left Party and five to the Free Democrats. The far-right German People's Union, whose vote share was steady at 2.3 percent, retained one seat.
For the last 12 years, the SPD has governed Bremen in a left-right coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, the same combination that forms the federal government.
The result in Bremen allows the SPD either to continue the coalition or turn to the Greens, reviving a center-left alliance that ran Germany under former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder until 2005.
Social Democratic Mayor Jens Boehrnsen left open his choice. "We will hold talks with those who come into consideration _ that is ... the CDU and the Greens, but not the Left Party," he said.
Nationally, the SPD is an equal partner in Merkel's government, but it trails in polls as it struggles to energize supporters and match the conservative chancellor's popularity.
The Bremen vote, the only state election this year, comes amid persistent bickering in the national coalition.
Merkel's CDU urged the Social Democrats to stick with them in Bremen. General secretary Ronald Pofalla said Germans voted out the SPD-Greens combination in 2005 because it "stands for mass unemployment and recession."
Bremen has the highest unemployment of any western German state, at 13.1 percent. It remained an SPD stronghold even as the party suffered repeated reverses in state votes under Schroeder.
Still, Sunday's result underlined the threat it faces from the left. The Left Party _ a combination of former Social Democrats disillusioned by economic reform and former East German communists _ did better than expected.
The party, which won seats in the federal parliament in 2005, had previously succeeded at state level only in the ex-communist east.
"We are now a federal German force, and Bremen proves that," said Gregor Gysi, the party's co-leader in the federal parliament.
Karl-Rudolf Korte, professor of political science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, said the smaller parties' strong performance was "typical for elections in the slipstream of a 'grand coalition.'"
"The erosion of the major parties is continuing," he said.
Some 487,000 people were eligible to vote for the 83-seat state legislature. Turnout was a lackluster 57.6 percent.
