The Next Saarland state election will be held on 27 March 2022 to elect the 17th

Landtag of Saarland The Landtag of the Saarland is the state diet (assembly), diet of the German federal state of Saarland. It convenes in Saarbrücken and currently consists of 51 members of five parties. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) is the largest ...

. The current government is coalition of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and

Social Democratic Party The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology. Active parties For ...

(SPD) led by

Minister-President A minister-president or minister president is the head of government in a number of European countries or subnational governments with a parliamentary or semi-presidential system of government where they preside over the council of ministers. It ...

Tobias Hans Tobias Hans (born 1 February 1978) is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who served as Minister-President of Saarland from 2018 to 2022. Political career Hans became a member of the Landtag of Saarland after the Saar ...

Election date

The Landtag is elected for five years, with its term commencing when the new Landtag first meets. As the previous election took place on 26 March 2017, the next election must take place before April 2022.

Electoral system

The 51 members of the Landtag are elected via

closed list Closed list describes the variant of party-list systems where voters can effectively only vote for political parties as a whole; thus they have no influence on the party-supplied order in which party candidates are elected. If voters had some inf ...

proportional representation Proportional representation (PR) refers to a type of electoral system under which subgroups of an electorate are reflected proportionately in the elected body. The concept applies mainly to geographical (e.g. states, regions) and political divis ...

using the

d'Hondt method The D'Hondt method, also called the Jefferson method or the greatest divisors method, is a method for allocating seats in parliaments among federal states, or in party-list proportional representation systems. It belongs to the class of highest- ...

. 41 seats are distributed in three multi-member constituencies, and the remaining ten at the state level. An

electoral threshold The electoral threshold, or election threshold, is the minimum share of the primary vote that a candidate or political party requires to achieve before they become entitled to representation or additional seats in a legislature. This limit can ...

of 5% of valid votes is applied to the Landtag; parties that fall below this threshold are ineligible to receive seats.

Background

In the previous election held on 26 March 2017, the CDU remained the largest party with 40.7% of votes cast, an increase of 5.5

percentage point A percentage point or percent point is the unit (measurement), unit for the Difference (mathematics), arithmetic difference between two percentages. For example, moving up from 40 percent to 44 percent is an increase of 4 percentage points, but a ...

s. The SPD declined slightly to 29.6%. The Left fell to 12.8%, a decline of 3.3 points.

Alternative for Germany Alternative for Germany (german: link=no, Alternative für Deutschland, AfD; ) is a right-wing populist * * * * * * * political party in Germany. AfD is known for its opposition to the European Union, as well as immigration to Germany. I ...

(AfD) contested its first election in Saarland, winning 6.2%.

The Greens The Greens or Greens may refer to: Current political parties * Australian Greens, also known as ''The Greens'' * Greens of Andorra * Greens of Bosnia and Herzegovina * Greens of Burkina * Greens (Greece) * Greens of Montenegro *Greens of Serbia *G ...

lost their representation in the Landtag with a result of 4.0%. The CDU had led a

grand coalition A grand coalition is an arrangement in a multi-party parliamentary system in which the two largest political parties of opposing political ideologies unite in a coalition government. The term is most commonly used in countries where there are t ...

with the SPD since 2012 under Minister-President

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (; Kramp; born 9 August 1962), sometimes referred to by her initials of AKK, is a retired German politician who served as Minister of Defence from 2019 to 2021 and as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) from ...

, which was renewed after the election. Kramp-Karrenbauer resigned as Minister-President after her election as General-Secretary of the CDU in February 2018, and was succeeded by Tobias Hans.

Parties

The table below lists parties currently represented in the 16th Landtag of Saarland.

Opinion polling

Party polling

Minister-President polling

Party competences

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Saarland state election, Next Elections in Saarland Future elections in Germany 2022 elections in Europe 2022 in Germany