By James Mackenzie and Friederike Heine
BERLIN, March 22 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) were on course to win an election in the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate on Sunday, ahead of their Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners who faced a "bitter" defeat after ruling the state for 35 years.
Early projections after polls closed showed Merz's CDU at 30.8% of the vote, ahead of the SPD at 26%, pointing to a victory for Merz after his party narrowly lost an election in the neighbouring state of Baden-Wuerttemberg on March 8.
CDU General Secretary Carsten Linnemann called it a "great result" that showed strong overall backing for the two partners in Merz's coalition, which nationwide polls indicate has seen a sharp drop in support since elections last year.
"If the result stays this way, the CDU/CSU and SPD will have more than 50% of the vote, which is also a strong result for the centrist parties," Linnemann said, referring to the CDU's sister party in Bavaria.
The two parties are now expected to form a coalition at the state level on the lines of the coalition in Berlin, with CDU candidate Gordon Schnieder on course to replace the sitting SPD premier, Alexander Schweitzer.
For Merz, battling to shore up Western support for Ukraine and facing the looming threat of an energy shock caused by the Iran war, victory in Rhineland-Palatinate was a relief after the narrow loss his party suffered two weeks ago.
But the result was a heavy blow to his Berlin coalition partners in the SPD, still reeling from their disastrous score in Baden-Wuerttemberg, where they won just 5.5% of the vote, barely scraping over the threshold to enter parliament.
SPD Secretary-General Tim Kluessendorf told the ARD the result, which would see the party's score in Rhineland-Palatinate falling by nearly 10 percentage points from the previous state election, was a "bitter setback."
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), now clearly established as Germany's second-strongest party at the national level, was set to form the main opposition bloc. It doubled its previous score to around 20% of the vote, its best-ever result in a western state.
AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla said the CDU had to explain how it would pursue conservative policies if it refused to enter a coalition with his party.
But Schnieder repeated the CDU would not join forces with the far-right. "It would spell the downfall of this country if we were to bring the AfD on board here," he said.
CRISIS FOR THE CENTRE-LEFT
The SPD had ruled Rhineland-Palatinate since 1991 and losing control of the state is likely to add to the air of crisis that has overshadowed the party since the collapse of the former SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz's governing coalition in Berlin in 2024.
Pollsters said voters in Rhineland-Palatinate, one of Germany's main wine-growing regions and home to chemicals giant BASF as well as a host of smaller Mittelstand companies, were heavily focused on economic issues that penalised the SPD.
The party had led a coalition with the environmental Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, who failed to make it into parliament, and is now expected to become the junior partner in a coalition with the CDU.
Party leader Lars Klingbeil, finance minister in Merz's government, accepted responsibility for the result but said the coalition in Berlin planned a major package of reforms and ruled out resigning. "I am not going to duck out of this question," he said.
The Rhineland-Palatinate election was the second of five state elections this year, ahead of closely watched races in September in Berlin and the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right AfD is hoping to win its first major election.
(Reporting by James Mackenzie and Friederike Heine; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Chris Reese)
