The Saxon state parliament will elect a new prime minister for the Free State on Wednesday morning. It is unclear whether incumbent Michael Kretschmer will be re-elected, as the CDU and SPD had hoped. He faces competition from AfD party and parliamentary group leader Jörg Urban and Matthias Berger, former expert mayor of Grimma, who is running as the Free Voters' candidate and has proposed the formation of a cross-party government.
An absolute majority of votes is required in the first round. Accordingly, at least 61 of the 120 parliamentarians would have to agree on a candidate. As allies of the minority coalition, the CDU and SPD are ten votes short of a majority of their own, so they are dependent on approval from other factions in order to get Kretschmer into office. However, the AfD and the Greens do not want to give the CDU politician a vote. The Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) and the Left have not yet announced their intentions.
It is also unclear whether AfD politician Urban and Free Voters candidate Berger will compete against Kretschmer in round one. In the second round of voting, the majority of votes cast is sufficient. However, if Urban and Berger together had more votes than Kretschmer, he would not have been elected.
The CDU was the strongest force in the state elections on September 1st with 31.9 percent – but only just, the AfD won 30.6 percent of the votes. The Union has 41 members of parliament, the AfD has 30. The BSW is represented by 15 women and men, the SPD by ten parliamentarians. The Greens and the Left have seven and six parliamentarians respectively, the Free Voters have one.
