 The German states of Brandenburg and Thuringia also held elections today, and results are now available in their respective official websites, listed on this site's links directory.
Both elections were notable for the success of the anti-euro (but not anti-EU) Alternative for Germany (AfD), which polled strongly and secured legislative representantion in both state parliaments. However, for the liberal Free Democratic Party (F.D.P.) today's polls were yet another round of unmitigated disaster, as the party fell well below the five percent threshold and lost all its seats in both states. In fact, since losing all its Bundestag seats in last year's general election, F.D.P. has finished below five percent in every legislative contest held in Germany this year, including last May's European Parliament election (in which the liberal party nonetheless managed to elect three MEPs as no threshold was in place for that vote), and the state election in Saxony last month. That said, the results for these two parties should not be entirely surprising, given that last year AfD had its best results in the states of the former East Germany, while conversely F.D.P. fared poorly there. Meanwhile, today's results for the other parties were not significantly out of the ordinary, with the exception of the distinctly poor showing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Thuringia - where it had its worst election result ever and finished a distant third, barely ahead of AfD - and the sharp drop of the Left Party in Brandenburg, where the post-communist party polled its lowest share of the vote in two decades.
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