Munich elected its first Green Party mayor on Sunday after a closely fought runoff vote, with the party's candidate Anna Hanusch taking 51.2 per cent of the second round against 48.8 per cent for the CSU's incumbent Dieter Reiter. The result delivers the largest city in conservative Bavaria to the Greens for the first time since the Bundesland's post-war creation.
Ms Hanusch, a 47-year-old architect and former district mayor of Maxvorstadt, ran on a platform combining transport-decarbonisation, a substantial expansion of the city's housing-cooperative programme, and accelerated permitting for new childcare places. Her runoff victory was narrower than first-round polling had suggested, with turnout in the CSU's strongholds in the city's northern districts higher than in 2020.
The mathematics of the result depended on transfers from supporters of the SPD's first-round candidate, who had been eliminated at 14 per cent in the May 4 first round, and from a fragmented left-of-CSU bloc that included the FDP and Volt. The AfD's 8.7 per cent first-round share appears to have transferred almost entirely to the CSU in the runoff but was insufficient to close the gap.
CSU general secretary Martin Huber acknowledged the loss as "a sobering message for the party" and indicated an internal review of campaign organisation in Munich, where the party has now lost the mayoralty for the first time since the post-war era. The result is also a fresh test for Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose national approval has slumped to 24 per cent.
Ms Hanusch will be sworn in on June 18 for a six-year term. Her first scheduled act is a meeting with Munich's public-transport agency MVG on the long-promised second S-Bahn tunnel, the largest single infrastructure project in southern Germany and one currently nine years behind its original delivery schedule.