The Election Commission responsible for conducting land elections in Saxony, adjusted the results of the vote that ended on Sunday, depriving the "Alternative for Germany" ("AdG") of the so-called blocking minority, the MDR TV channel reported.
The day after the publication of the preliminary election results, the election commission in Saxony stated that when counting votes, allegedly "a technical error was made." As a result of the corrections made, the AdG, which had secured the support of 30.6% of the voters of the Free State following the results of the vote, lost one mandate and, as a result, the blocking minority.
"As a result of a software error, incorrect data on the distribution of seats in the Landtag of Saxony were published last night. Based on the results of repeated processing of ballots, the Greens Party and The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) gets one more seat (7 instead of 6 and 10 instead of 9, respectively), and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the AFD get one less mandate (41 instead of 42 and 40 instead of 41, respectively) than previously announced," the statement said. in the official statement of the Electoral Commission of Saxony.
The blocking minority belongs to the parties that managed to get more than a third of the seats in parliament, in the case of the Landtag of Saxony, the minimum threshold for obtaining such a status is 41 votes. The presence of a blocking minority would allow the "AdG" to veto bills that involve amendments to The Constitution of the federal land. The party could also gain control over the process of appointing judges of the Land Constitutional Court, as well as the head of the Accounts Chamber. According to the new distribution of seats, only the CDU of the current Prime Minister of the land, Michael Kretschmer, now has a blocking majority in the Saxony legislature.
The secretary General of the regional branch of the AfD in Saxony, Jan Zwerg, said that his party would seek a second revision of the distribution of seats in the Landtag, as well as changes in the methodology used to determine the number of mandates.
The winner in the elections held on Sunday was the CDU, which gained 31.9%. The pro-Russian "AdG" was able to improve the results of five years ago by more than 3 percentage points and secured the support of 30.6% of voters. In third place was the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (11.8%), for which the completed vote was one of the first serious tests since the founding of the party at the beginning of this year. The ruling SPD and Greens at the federal level gained only 7.3% and 5.1% of the vote, respectively, and their partner in the federal coalition in Berlin, the Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP), could not overcome the minimum five percent barrier.