Thuringia’s former short-term prime minister and state party leader Thomas Kemmerich is leading the FDP Thuringia in the state elections on September 1st. The 59-year-old was nominated as the top candidate for the state parliament list at a party conference in Weimar.
He received 120 out of 134 valid votes cast. 13 delegates voted against him and there was one abstention. According to the FDP, the result corresponded to around 89.5 percent of the votes cast. The Aachen native did not have an opposing candidate.
Kemmerich caused a nationwide storm of protest across all parties in February 2020 after he was elected Prime Minister of Thuringia largely with votes from the AfD. A little later he resigned from the office. It is also controversial within the FDP. The federal association had announced that the Thuringian party colleagues would not receive any financial donations from the FDP’s nationwide campaign fund.
In the 2019 state elections, the FDP only narrowly managed to get over the five percent hurdle. Surveys recently saw the party at two to three percent, which would mean the end of the state parliament.
