Europe | A portent or a blip?

The Social Democrats suffer crushing defeat in Schleswig-Holstein

Will it be repeated in crucial elections in North Rhine-Westphalia?

|BERLIN

“OF COURSE THE result is bitter,” said Saskia Esken, putting it mildly after the cataclysmic defeat of her Social Democratic Party (SPD) at a state election in Schleswig-Holstein on May 8th. Yet the co-chair of the party insisted that despite the worst score in its history in a place that was once a stronghold, the SPD can still win the vote that really counts, in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany’s most populous state, on May 15th.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “A portent or a blip?”

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