1988 Schleswig-Holstein state election

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1988 Schleswig-Holstein state election

8 May 1988

The 1988 Schleswig-Holstein state election was held on 8 May 1988 to elect the members of the Landtag of Schleswig-Holstein. The snap election was called due to the political stalemate that had occurred in the previous state election of 13 September 1987 and also because of the Barschel affair.^[1]

The election resulted in SPD winning an absolute majority, so Björn Engholm chose to govern alone without coalition. For the first time in 38 years, CDU had to go into opposition.

In the state elections on September 13, 1987, the CDU under Prime Minister Uwe Barschel lost the absolute majority it had held since 1971 with 42.6 percent of the votes cast and a loss of 6.4 percentage points,^[2] and for the first time since the state elections in 1958 it was behind the SPD, which achieved 45.2 percent of the votes under its top candidate Björn Engholm.

Together with the FDP, which had returned to the state parliament (4 seats), the CDU had 37 of the 74 state parliament seats. In contrast, there were 36 SPD representatives and the SSW representative, Karl Otto Meyer.

The formation of a government was made more difficult by the affair surrounding Prime Minister Uwe Barschel, who resigned on October 2, 1987 and died in Geneva on the night of October 10-11, 1987 under circumstances that have not yet been clarified.^[a]

Due to the Barschel affair, Meyer refused to vote for a CDU candidate, thus paving the way for new elections.

The election was influenced by the results of the committee of inquiry into the machinations launched by the State Chancellery against the SPD's top candidate Engholm. According to the knowledge available at the time, a large part of the machinations, some of which were illegal, were the work of Uwe Barschel.

The CDU's candidates for the office of Prime Minister, which had been held by Interior Minister Henning Schwarz since Barschel's resignation, were the former Minister of Justice Heiko Hoffmann and the SPD's top candidate Björn Engholm.

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