BREMEN: Germany's eurosceptic AfD party hoped to enter its fifth state assembly Sunday as voters went to the polls in the northern city-state of Bremen, a bastion of the centre-left Social Democrats.
Polls placed the two-year-old Alternative for Germany, which has been torn by infighting and defections, at around five percent, the cut-off mark for entry into the assembly of the smallest of Germany's 16 states.
Founded on a call for Germany to leave the eurozone, and taking a populist hard line on law-and-order and immigration issues, the AfD last year won entry into three eastern German state parliaments.
In February it also won seats in the northern city-state of Hamburg.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives looked set to stay in opposition in Bremen, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) has ruled alone or in coalition ever since the end of World War II.
The campaign for the election, where 490,000 eligible voters can cast their ballots, has been quiet, with SPD city mayor Jens Boehrnsen, 66, widely expected to stay at the helm.
Boehrnsen, a silver-haired former administrative law judge, has been in power since 2007, ruling with the ecologist Greens, the driving force behind the German energy transition toward renewables.
Latest polls gave him an approval rating of 65 percent.
Bremen has been an SPD stronghold despite the gradual decline of the local ship-building industry and strained public finances.
One newspaper remarked that all top candidates already knew what they would do after the vote -- "exactly the same thing as they are doing now".
Polls predicted around 38 percent for the SPD, 22 percent for the conservative Christian Democrats under their top candidate Elisabeth Motschmann, and 16 percent for the Greens.
The far-left Linke was predicted to win eight percent and the pro-business Free Democrats five percent.
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