Berlin votes tomorrow with CDU and Linke within two points
Berlin elects its 20th Abgeordnetenhaus tomorrow, Sunday 20 September, and the race for first place is as close as it has been in years. Polling stations open at 08:00 and close at 18:00, and about 2.5 million people are entitled to vote.
Every recent poll puts the Left party and the Christian Democrats within two points of each other, but they disagree on the order. The ZDF Politbarometer Extra, fielded between 14 and 17 September among 1,611 people, has the Left on 22 percent and the CDU on 20. An INSA poll for Bild has the two level on 20 each. A Civey survey has the Left on 21 and the CDU on 20. The AfD sits at 18 in all of them, the Greens between 15 and 16, and the Social Democrats at 12.
The consequence is the same whichever way the top two finish. The governing coalition of the CDU and the SPD would lose its majority. An alliance of the Left, the Greens and the SPD would have one, and so would a combination of the CDU, the Greens and the SPD. The government is therefore likely to be settled by negotiation in the weeks that follow rather than by the result on the night.
There is no incumbent on the ballot. The governing mayor is not standing again, which forced his party to reorganise late in the campaign. Asked who they would prefer in the job, 25 percent named Elif Eralp of the Left, 24 percent Stefan Evers of the CDU and 12 percent Werner Graf of the Greens.
Seventeen parties are standing. A peculiarity of Berlin law lets each party choose whether to run a single list across the city or separate lists in the districts. The chamber has at least 130 seats, 78 of them won directly in constituencies, though overhang and levelling seats push the real number higher. It currently has 159 members.
In 2023 the CDU took 28.2 percent, the SPD and the Greens 18.4 each, the Left 12.2 and the AfD 9.1.