Sharjah 24 – AFP: Germany's Social Democrats on Sunday won a closely-fought regional election that was dominated by worries over soaring energy costs, giving Chancellor Olaf Scholz a welcome boost as a difficult winter looms.
Scholz's centre-left SPD was set to remain the largest force in the coastal state of Lower Saxony, taking around 32.7-33.3 percent of the vote, according to exit polls by public broadcasters ARD and ZDF.
The conservative CDU party of former chancellor Angela Merkel came a distant second at 27.5 percent, its worst result in the state in six decades.
The election was widely billed as a key test of Scholz's handling of the energy crisis caused by Russia's war in Ukraine. The outcome marks a turnaround after his SPD lost the last two regional polls to the CDU, in North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein.
The Greens, Scholz's coalition partners on the federal level, surged to around 14 percent, their best-ever showing in the state.
The far-right AfD also had reason to cheer, nearly doubling its result from five years ago and climbing to almost 12 percent as it capitalised on voter anger over the rising cost of living.
The AfD "is a protest party" that benefits from "crisis and fears", political scientist Karl-Rudolf Korte told ZDF.
The liberal FDP, Scholz's third coalition partner in Berlin, appears to have only narrowly scraped the five-percent threshold required to enter into the regional parliament, according to the preliminary results.
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