Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel, who’s held his nation’s premiership for the past decade, will have to consider a new coalition amid painful losses by his Green governing partner in Sunday’s national elections.
(Bloomberg) — Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel, who’s held his nation’s premiership for the past decade, will have to consider a new coalition amid painful losses by his Green governing partner in Sunday’s national elections.
Bettel’s liberals, the Democratic Party, won 14 seats in the 60-seat parliament and his socialist partner, LSAP, got 11 seats, but the Greens lost more than half of their seats, toppling the current three-way alliance’s required majority to form a new government.
Luxembourg populist party ADR overtook the Greens in parliament with five seats versus the Greens’ four, final results showed late on Sunday.
The Conservatives, led by former finance minister Luc Frieden, won Sunday’s election as they’ve done in previous years, retaining 21 seats. It’s the first chance in 10 years for the nation’s main opposition party, the Christian Social People’s party, to make a comeback.
“Luxembourgers today gave the CSV a clear mandate to form the next government,” Frieden told party colleagues late on Sunday.
Bettel’s DP has been in a coalition with the Greens and the Socialists since 2013, when they pushed out former premier Jean-Claude Juncker’s CSV from government over a dramatic 24 hours, and ended his reign of almost two decades as prime minister.
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