Reuters - A minister-president from the Green Party should, for the first time leading a German state, after the brilliant breakthrough Sunday the Green party in regional elections in Baden-Wuerttemberg, the CDU governed since 1953.
The Christian Democrats (CDU) remain the largest party in the Land, with 39% according to final results, a decrease of five percentage points to 44.2% of previous regional elections in 2006.
But with their allies in the FDP, they only account for 44.3% against a left SPD-Greens are ahead with 47.3%.
FDP Liberals saw their score reduced by half compared to 2006, from 10.7% to only 5.3%, which allows them to sit in parliament narrowly in Stuttgart.
These are the Greens are the big winners of this election day, with 24.2% because they have more than doubled their score from 2006 (11.7%) and they pass the SPD, which, with 23.1% , fell by two percentage points compared to 25.2% in 2006.
The leading candidate of the Greens, Winfried Kretschmann, was to become the first minister-president of a German state ecologist, a revolution in the history of Germany.
"We will initiate political change in this Land," said Kretschmann, aged 62. The head of the SPD list, Nils Schmid said that voters had given a clear mandate for the Social Democrats and Greens to lead the Baden-Wuerttemberg.SPD and Greens did, however, that will have a narrow majority, with one voice, the Landtag in Stuttgart.
This is nonetheless a stinging defeat for Chancellor Angela Merkel. This new electoral setback in the state's most prosperous countries place Angela Merkel in an awkward position. On 20 February, German conservatives had already lost the city-state of Hamburg. "It's a painful defeat," conceded the Federal Education Minister Annette Schavan.
In Germany, setbacks in regional elections may have national implications.In 2005, after losing the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced early parliamentary elections, and was then beaten.
CDU pays its mistakes
In another Land southwest of Germany, Rhineland-Palatinate, the Social Democrats, who lead the region for 17 years, have lost their absolute majority, but Sunday they will be able to form a coalition with allies comfortable environmentalists.
The SPD records a loss of nearly 10 points compared to previous regional, but with 35.7%, it is ahead of the CDU (35.2%).With the backing of the Greens, which rose sharply to 15.4%, they have a majority in the Diet of Mainz.
The Christian Democrats had made in Baden-Wurttemberg Land's richest Germany with 11 million inhabitants with cities such as Stuttgart, Mannheim, Karlsruhe and Heidelberg, one of their electoral stronghold.
But the hostility of the electorate to Atomic Energy critics and cons of the hesitancy Angela Merkel have been strong themes of the campaign in a region where the Greens had been on the rise for several months because they been leading the opposition to a proposed new main station in the heart of Stuttgart, the state capital.
A series of large demonstrations were held against the project last year in this city.
Most importantly, the CDU seems to be paying his mistakes on the nuclear issue. Saturday, more than 200,000 people marched in major cities across the country by demanding the permanent closure of all German nuclear power plants.After all
first extended the life span of 17 units of the country, the federal government decided the immediate closure of seven of the oldest in the wake of accidents in Japan at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant.
Beyond the nuclear policy reversals Angela Merkel on Libya or the debt crisis in the euro area have also turned these elections into a referendum on regional policy as Chancellor has been conducting a year and a half with Liberal Democrats.
Three other regional elections will be held this year in Germany on May 22 in the city-state of Bremen, September 4 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and September 18 in Berlin.
