Runoff elections in Lower Saxony | Hanover remains green

Belit Onay (Greens) remains mayor of Hanover. Photo: dpa/Michael Matthey Hanover.  The AfD clearly missed out on the first top municipal positions in Lower Saxony - while the Greens defended the town hall in Hanover. In the state capital, Mayor Belit Onay won according to the preliminary results with 61.5 percent against the SPD candidate Axel von der Ohe, who got 38.5 percent. 

Onay has ruled Hanover since 2019. Before that, the city was in SPD hands for a long time. The defeated von der Ohe advised his party to accept the result “internally too”. The mayor and council election gave a clear mandate: “The mandate is green-red. We should accept that.”

The SPD politician Eva Bender will be the new president of the Hanover region. She won the runoff election with 69.4 percent against the CDU candidate Oliver Junk. Most recently, the position was held by Steffen Krach, who has since moved to Berlin. 

In Braunschweig - the second largest city in the country - incumbent Thorsten Kornblum (SPD) was re-elected with 75.6 percent. In Osnabrück, Mayor Katharina Pötter (CDU) prevailed against the Green candidate Volker Bajus with almost 57 percent.

In the Osnabrück district, incumbent Anna Kebschull held her own with around two-thirds of the votes. This time she no longer ran as a Green Party candidate, but as an individual candidate. It was a similar story in Lüneburg. Claudia Kalisch remains mayor there. She is a member of the Green Party, but also ran as an individual candidate. Both justified this by saying that their office was non-partisan. 

In Göttingen, the Greens will in future be the mayor. Onyeka Oshionwu prevailed against the CDU candidate Ehsan Kangarani with almost 63 percent. The university town's town hall has mostly been in the hands of the SPD in recent decades. However, the Social Democratic candidate did not make it into the runoff this time.

The AfD was represented in three runoff elections. In the independent city of Salzgitter, Mayor Frank Klingebiel (CDU) - in office since 2006 - prevailed with 74.7 percent against AfD candidate Patricia Mair with 25.3 percent. In the small town of Munster in the Heidekreis, the individual applicant Anna Adamczak won with around 80 percent against the AfD applicant. In Bockenem in the Hildesheim district, the individual candidate Jens Lüer also prevailed against the AfD candidate with 69.6 percent.

Two weeks after the local elections, a total of 123 runoff elections took place for full-time positions such as mayors and district administrators. Those elected serve for eight years. All results are initially preliminary.  dpa/nd

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