North Rhine-Westphalia state election, 1995

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14 May 1995

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All 221 seats of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia

	First party	Second party	Third party

Leader	Johannes Rau	Helmut Linssen	Bärbel Höhn
Party	SPD	CDU	Green
Last election	123 seats, 50.0%	90 seats, 36.7%	12 seats, 5.1%
Seats won	108	89	24
Seat change	-15	-1	+12
Popular vote	3,816,639	3,124,758	830,861
Percentage	46.0%	37.7%	10.0%
Swing	-4.0%	+1.0%	+4.9%

	Fourth party

Leader	Achim Rohde
Party	FDP
Last election	14 seats, 5.8%
Seats won	0
Seat change	-14
Popular vote	332,634
Percentage	4.0%
Swing	-1.8%

Minister-President before election

Johannes Rau
SPD

Elected Minister-President

Johannes Rau
SPD

The North Rhine-Westphalia state election, 1995 was held on May 14, 1995 to elect 221 members of the Landtag (state legislature) of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The incumbent state government at that time was a SPD majority government led by Johannes Rau that tried to defend its majority after 15 years in power. The main opposition was the CDU led by Helmut Linssen since 1990.

The election took place several months after Helmut Kohl was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany for the fifth time after his CDU/CSU/FDP coalition government defended its majority in the 1994 federal election. Thus, this state election had the potential to result in possible alternative coalitions which could be a useful model for the forming of the next federal government.

As a result of this state election, the SPD government lost its majority in the Landtag so that it had to form a coalition with the Greens who doubled their share of votes and seats compared to 1990. Despite maintaining its share of votes the CDU was far away of forming a government as its most probable coalition partner, the FDP failed to surpass the 5%-threshold needed to gain seats in the Landtag.

Beside the influence of national politics, where people's support for the Kohl government slowly began to drop as a result of growing economic problems, environmental issues were the main topic of the election campaign. It was especially the Green party that highlighted the issue of Garzweiler II, a lignite-mining project that was strongly criticised by local inhabitants because they would have to be resettled then. The main opposition focused on topics such as education, domestic security (e.g. crime) and the support of local industries. As these topics have rather been debated in a rather consensual manner most controversy was between the SPD and the Greens during the election campaign.

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