Sunday 8 October marks national (or legislative) elections in Luxembourg, with the country’s citizens casting their vote and determining who will lead the country for the next five years.
Our page dedicated to everything national elections is already live, and on it you will find all of the articles we have published related to the upcoming elections. You will also find an overview of candidates, sorted by region (North, East, South, and Center) and political party.
Live ticker
The RTL Today web team will be with you throughout election Sunday through a dedicated live ticker. Through it we will share with you the latest updates, interviews with politicians, statements from the parties, interviews with voters, galleries, videos, and more.
We will have a full team in place from early morning right until the end of affairs, and welcome the submission of questions and reader questions as well.
Today Radio
Our colleagues at Today Radio will be live from 8pm with a special election live show, hosted by Lisa Burke with help from trusted news reader Sasha Kehoe. Together they will deliver the latest election updates as they come in, in addition to interviews with politicians and other stakeholders throughout the night.
Interactive widgets
As we draw closer to election night additional features will be added to this page. This includes past election data for repeat candidates, so that you can see how many votes they received in any previous elections in which they ran. The same data will also be available for parties as a whole, with election-by-election comparisons.
Exit polls and projections
Come election night on Sunday, we will be able to share with you some initial projections as to how the election is going based on exit polls. These data are gathered by Ilres and Kantar, and first results are expected from around 6pm. We will present the results as interactive graphs for ease of overview and comparison.
Results
The timing of official results is difficult to predict, given that this is subject to the process of vote counting and verification. However, we expect partial results to arrive early in the evening of election Sunday. Full national results are likely to be available at some point around midnight, but could take longer.
Naturally we will continuously publish results as counts come in from the various voting districts, including partial results.
Luxembourg’s parliament (Chambre des Députés) consists of 60 elected MPs, or Députés. The country is divided into four constituencies, with nine seats allocated to the North constituency, seven for the East constituency, 21 for the Centre constituency, and 23 for the South constituency.
The last elections were held in 2018, and subsequently saw the formation of a second government by DP leader and incumbent PM Xavier Bettel alongside coalition partners LSAP and The Greens. Together these parties received nearly 63% of the vote, but the largest party remained CSV which alone received 28.31%.
Prior to the 2013 elections which saw the incumbent coalition take power, Luxembourg was led by CSV Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker from 1995. Indeed, CSV held the premiership uninterrupted from 1979 until 2013.
The 2018 elections saw 10 parties vying for the vote, a number that has reached 12 for this year’s elections. These are - in accordance with their election list number - LSAP (Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party), DP (Democratic Party), The Greens, CSV (Christian Social People’s Party), The Left, ADR (Alternative Democratic Reform Party), Pirate Party, Focus, Volt, KPL (Communist Party of Luxembourg), Liberté - Fräiheet!, and The Conservatives.
Appointing a new government
In the days following the election, the Grand Duke appoints either a formateur or an informateur. The latter is tasked with meeting with representatives of the main parties and subsequently reporting back to the Grand Duke, to whom he or she recommends a formateur.
A formateur, meanwhile, is tasked with building government. Following the last elections in 2018, attorney general of state Martine Solovieff was appointed informateur and, subsequent to her talks with the main parties, recommended that Xavier Bettel (DP) be appointed formateur.
For the last elections, this process took approximately six weeks.
Members of government
The appointment of ministerial roles is not limited to elected MPs, though they too can be tapped for a ministerial role. In the instance that an MP is selected for government, they lose their role as an MP - due to the conflict of interest - and their role as MP is given to the candidate with the second-highest vote count.
One recent example of the appointment of a minister who had not first been elected as MP can be found in Paulette Lenert (LSAP), who following the 2018 elections was appointed to the role of minister for consumer protection and for cooperation and humanitarian action. Prior to this, Lenert had worked as an adviser to the Ministry of Civile Service.
