According to the first figures, Woidke even achieved a better result than in the last state election in 2019. The SPD therefore achieved 30 percent – when was that last? He thus spared the party leadership and the Chancellor an acute crisis. An irony of fate. Because the Brandenburg Prime Minister explicitly renounced the Chancellor’s support during the election campaign and even distanced himself from the traffic light coalition on the issue of migration.

Instead, he used a daring tactic that may have ultimately brought the decisive votes: Woidke tied his political future to an election victory and relied entirely on his personal popularity, even among non-SPD supporters. He played all-in, risked everything and won a lot. So he won the election not with Scholz, but despite the unpopularity of the Chancellor and his traffic light coalition.

Scholz follows the election results from 6,400 kilometers away

The Chancellor probably doesn’t care about these details for now. Scholz flew to New York on Saturday afternoon to attend a UN summit on the future, 6,400 kilometers as the crow flies from Brandenburg’s capital Potsdam, where he lives. Shortly after 5 p.m. German time, he was connected from the German UN embassy on First Avenue in Manhattan to the Willy Brandt House. By then it was already clear that things could go well. Scholz can now breathe a sigh of relief.

If Woidke had only come in second place and had he resigned from office as announced, things would have looked very different. The chancellor’s fate was to a certain extent negotiated in Brandenburg. Scholz, who has been stuck deep in the polls for months, is considered to be on the ropes after the disastrous defeats in the European elections as well as in Saxony and Thuringia.

A look at the US election campaign

One year before the federal election, the SPD is debating whether the 66-year-old is the right candidate for chancellor. At least since people began to look with some envy at the USA, where the replacement of an unpopular head of government as the leading candidate gave the Democrats unexpected momentum. Even party leader Lars Klingbeil had to admit this when he attended the nomination party conference in Chicago.

The first to say so was Franz Müntefering, the most popular living ex-party leader. He declared the question of the candidate for chancellor to be open. And this despite the fact that Scholz had already more or less chosen himself before the summer break: “I will run for chancellor and become chancellor again.”

A week before the election, Munich’s mayor Dieter Reiter was the first relatively prominent active Social Democrat to publicly suggest Defense Minister Boris Pistorius as a possible candidate for chancellor – and in doing so expressed what many in the SPD think. No other SPD top politician is as popular with the population as the 64-year-old Lower Saxon.

Chancellor on probation

This finally gave the SPD its final answer. Woidke’s election victory will probably give Scholz some breathing room. But the debate about whether he is the right person for the upcoming federal election campaign is not completely over. He is now chancellor on probation.

“The party is dissatisfied with our position in federal politics. Yes, there is enormous pressure,” said party leader Lars Klingbeil before the election. The party expects him to give up his role as moderator in the coalition and deliver. And that means social democratic content: pension package, collective bargaining law, protection of industrial jobs. All topics with potential for conflict in the traffic light coalition.

But the two smaller traffic light partners are also now entering the last year before the federal election in a rather weakened state. After its disastrous results in Saxony and Thuringia, the FDP once again failed to clear the 5 percent hurdle with 1.1 and 0.9 percent respectively. The Greens – so far in double figures and a governing party – must fear for their continued presence in the state parliament.

According to the first figures, the AfD ultimately failed to win against the incumbent Prime Minister. In this state election, it looked far beyond the borders of Brandenburg, and not only in terms of its campaign topics of the war in Ukraine and migration. Some leading officials believe that the AfD could use the east as a springboard for nationwide advancement. But some of the narratives that the right-wing populists use to successfully win votes in the east are less successful in the west. This is due to the different view of Russia, but also has to do with the fact that immigration is not as negatively connotated for people who have worked on assembly lines or attended school with immigrants from the so-called guest worker generation as it is in the east.

Highest hurdle budget

The coalition now has difficult weeks ahead of it. The 2025 budget must be drawn up by the end of November. If the traffic light coalition gets over this hurdle, then there is a good chance that the traffic light coalition will get through by the regular election date of September 28, 2025. But things could also turn out differently. Sometimes courage means staying in a coalition despite controversy, Finance Minister Christian Lindner recently prophesied in the “Rheinische Post”. “But sometimes courage also means taking risks to create new political dynamics.”