The electoral commission in charge of holding state elections in Saxony has corrected the results of the vote that ended on Sunday, depriving the Alternative for Germany (AfD) of its so-called blocking minority, the MDR television channel reported.
The day after the preliminary election results were published, Saxony’s electoral commission claimed that a “technical error” had allegedly been made in the counting of votes. As a result of the corrections made, the AfD, which received the support of 30.6% of voters in the Free State according to the voting results, lost a mandate and, as a result, a blocking minority.
“Due to a software error, incorrect data on the distribution of seats in the Landtag of Saxony were made public tonight. According to the results of the reprocessing of the ballots, the Green Party and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) receive one more seat (7 instead of 6 and 10 instead of 9, respectively), and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the AfD receive one fewer mandate (41 instead of 42 and 40 instead of 41, respectively) than previously announced,” – says the official statement of the Saxon electoral commission.
A blocking minority is held by parties that managed to win more than a third of the seats in parliament; in the case of the Landtag of Saxony, the minimum threshold for acquiring this status is 41 votes. The presence of a blocking minority would allow the AfD to veto bills that propose changes to the federal state constitution. The party could also gain control of the appointment process for judges to the Land Constitutional Court as well as the president of the Court of Audit. According to the new distribution of seats, only the CDU of the current state premier now has a blocking majority in the Saxon legislature. Michael Kretschmer.
General Secretary of the AfD regional branch in Saxony Jan Zwerg He said his party would seek a further review of the distribution of seats in the Landtag, as well as a change in the methodology used to determine the number of seats.
The CDU won Sunday’s election with 31.9 percent. The pro-Russian AfD managed to improve its results from five years ago by more than 3 percentage points and received the support of 30.6 percent of voters. In third place was the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (11.8 percent), for which the final vote was one of the first serious tests since the party was founded earlier this year. The governing SPD and the Greens at federal level received only 7.3 percent and 5.1 percent of the vote respectively, and their federal coalition partner in Berlin, the Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP), failed to overcome the minimum threshold of five percent.
