What lessons can you draw from the 11 June elections?
: There is one clear winner this year: the Liberals. And their victory is not limited to their performance in Luxembourg City. Of course, everyone will remember ’s historic performance, an important political fact. But this nice tree should not obscure other interesting shrubs for the Liberals, who are making progress in many municipalities and consolidating their existing strongholds. What’s more, the party is smoothing its path at national level.
What is interesting is that in municipalities clearly identified as centre-right, there are bridges between the DP and CSV electorates. And in both directions, even if this year it is the DP that benefits the most.
If there is a winner, there are bound to be losers. Who lost the most in these elections?
Déi Greng, without a doubt. Despite the fact that the local elections are the ideal ballot for the party, the one in which it can do better than others, it experienced a general structural setback.
Structural in the sense that it’s not linked to business deals, such as the Traversini affair of recent months. With the exception of Differdange, in all the communes where proportional voting prevailed and where the party was present, it fell by an average of 3% to 5%. Structural in the sense that it is linked not just to the municipal issues, but to the general issues of recent months, such as energy costs, transport, etc.
Against this backdrop, the legislative elections promise to be perilous.
What about the LSAP and the CSV?
For the LSAP, Dudelange and Esch-sur-Alzette should not mask the fact that the LSAP continues to lose ground in the municipal elections. The 2023 results are below those of 2017 and well below those of 2013. Historically, the LSAP has been a very strong party in local elections. But despite good results here and there, the decline continues.
The [CSV] has clearly underperformed in Luxembourg City.
And this is the same phenomenon facing the CSV. The party has clearly underperformed in Luxembourg City, where it could have hoped to take advantage of a phenomenon of attrition of power that would have affected the DP, with whom it is in coalition. This did not happen. Voters in the city must have preferred Lydie Polfer’s line to ’ more centrist, even centrist ecologist-managerial line. This underperformance is reflected in the party’s national decline, which lost 4.4% of the vote. But unlike the LSAP, which is in decline, the CSV is stagnating.
These four “government” parties together accounted for 80.7% of the vote. What about the remaining 19.3%?
This is the final lesson to be learned from the elections: the fragmentation of Luxembourg’s political landscape is continuing and growing. Many lists from civil society have been put forward, and small parties such as the ADR and Pirates are making progress. These gains remain small, averaging between 1% and 2%, but they are making their mark on the landscape.
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Can this deep-rootedness influence the formation of a governing coalition?
I think that today all scenarios are possible, from a coalition with two partners to four.
Do we have any idea of the impact of non-Luxembourg residents’ vote?
We don’t have any figures yet. But I do have some hypotheses. Past studies have shown that for a very long time, foreign residents voted according to their national reference points. But since 2013, and even more so in 2017 and 2023, we have observed that foreigners are increasingly aligning themselves with the average vote of Luxembourgers. We will measure this. But we can assume that in the city of Luxembourg, foreign residents, given the sociology of the registered foreign electorate, there has been a slight increase in the DP vote. This will not necessarily be the case in other municipalities.
This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.