North Rhine-Westphalia state election, 2005

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22 May 2005

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All 187 seats of the Landtag of North Rhine-Westphalia

	First party	Second party

Leader	Jürgen Rüttgers	Peer Steinbrück
Party	CDU	SPD
Last election	88 seats, 37.0%	102 seats, 42.8%
Seats won	89	74
Seat change	+1	-28
Popular vote	3,695,806	3,059,074
Percentage	44.8%	37.1%
Swing	+7.8%	-5.7%

	Third party	Fourth party

Leader	Bärbel Höhn	Andreas Pinkwart
Party	Green	FDP
Last election	17 seats, 7.1%	24 seats, 10.4%
Seats won	12	12
Seat change	-5	-12
Popular vote	509,219	508,354
Percentage	6.2%	6.2%
Swing	-0.9%	-4.2%

Minister-President before election

Peer Steinbrück
SPD

Elected Minister-President

Jürgen Rüttgers
CDU

Peer Steinbrück
SPD

Jürgen Rüttgers
CDU

The North Rhine-Westphalia state election, 2005, was conducted on May 22, 2005, to elect members to the Landtag (state legislature) of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. It was a victory for the Christian Democratic Union, who received enough seats to form a coalition with their preferred partner, the FDP, and end the previous government formed by the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, who also ruled at the federal level.

Leading up to the election, the state was run by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, with Peer Steinbrück as minister-president.

For much of 2004, there had been speculation that if the opposition Christian Democratic Union were to win this election, they would gain a two-thirds majority in the national upper house, the Bundesrat, and force a new election for the Bundestag by making the country ungovernable for Gerhard Schröder's coalition. Following the CDU's loss of a majority in Saxony, this risk was alleviated; however, North Rhine-Westphalia had been governed by the SPD alone or in coalition since 1966, so a defeat there would be perceived as a grave blow to the SPD.

Leading up to the election, polling in the state indicated a consistent lead (from 5-11% depending on agency) for a coalition of the CDU and the FDP over the SPD-Green share. In general, high German unemployment and the unpopularity of the national SPD and the Hartz IV reforms appeared to have taken a toll. Polls did indicate that SPD state leader Steinbrück was personally more popular than CDU state leader Jürgen Rüttgers, though.

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