Hesse state election of 2008

Hesse state election, 2008

← 2003

27 January 2008

2009 →

	First party	Second party	Third party

Leader	Roland Koch	Andrea Ypsilanti	Jörg-Uwe Hahn
Party	CDU	SPD	FDP
Last election	56 seats, 48.8%	33 seats, 29.1%	9 seats, 7.9%
Seats won	42	42	11
Seat change	-14	+9	+2
Percentage	36.8%	36.7%	9.4%

	Fourth party	Fifth party

Leader	Tarek Al-Wazir	Willi van Ooyen
Party	Green	Left
Last election	12 seats, 10.1%	none
Seats won	9	6
Seat change	+3	+6
Percentage	7.5%	5.1%

Minister-President before election

Roland Koch (acting)
CDU

Elected Minister-President

Roland Koch
CDU

Roland Koch (acting)
CDU

Roland Koch
CDU

The state election to elect members of the Landtag of Hesse was held in the German state of Hesse on 27 January 2008.

For the previous 5 years, Hesse's state government (Landtag) had been ruled by the CDU, which had taken a majority of seats in the 2003 elections.

In the run-up to the election, opinion polls were showing that the CDU had lost popularity. The incumbent CDU minister-president Roland Koch initiated a tough-approach campaign against immigrant youth violence as an electoral tactic. The German political left attacked it as xenophobic at the time. Other issues were various economic issues including minimum wage concerns, education, and controversy over the planned major expansion of the Rhine-Main airport.

The far-left Linke party stood for elections in Hesse for the first time in 2008, as did the far-right NPD. The generally sour political mood was as "a rising tide lifting the boats" of all non-centrist parties.

The 2008 election saw the CDU's share of the vote plummet to its lowest level since the 1966 Landtag election. (This abysmal performance by the CDU was also mirrored in the Bavaria state election later that year, which saw CDU/CSU support decline to its lowest level ever.)

The SPD, under its leader Andrea Ypsilanti, increased its share of the vote substantially, from 29% to 37%, and it claimed victory as a result. The other winner—and perhaps the bigger winner overall considering their relative starting positions and the subsequent events in Hesse politics—was the far-left Linke party. They entered the Hesse Landtag with 5.1% of the vote, clearing the five-percent hurdle. This was the second western Landtag in which the Linke party had won seats (the first having been earlier in 2008 in Lower Saxony).

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