Luxembourg’s Christian Social People’s Party won Sunday’s general election, giving the conservatives a chance to retake government after 10 years in opposition and possibly deposing Xavier Bettel as prime minister.
The Conservatives, led by former finance minister Luc Frieden, won 21 seats in the 60-seat parliament. Bettel’s liberals, the Democratic Party, won 14 seats 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.
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 coalition partner. Luxembourg Grand Duke Henri will name a mediator to begin talks among the party leaders to explore new coalition possibilities.
Luxembourg populist party ADR overtook the Greens in parliament with five seats versus the Greens’ four, final results showed late on Sunday.
“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.
(Updates with next steps in the third paragraph.)
