🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[Estrella]

Huh. This is, I assume, obvious and therefore a stupid question, but isn’t it highly unusual for the Greens to hold onto these polling numbers?

Well, yes, but we aren't living in usual times. And it certainly isn't surprising - with the ineptness and factional struggles in SPD and now CDU as well, many voters are leaving for the Greens - not as weird a choice as it may seem, because today's Grünen are an amorphous socially progressive but ultimately centrist party à la Canadian Liberals.

(Going off on a tangent here, but talking about Canada, is it possible that, post-Merkel, German politics would realign along similar lines? Social liberals (Grünen) and conservatives (CDU/CSU) as the two big parties that would compete to provide the Chancellor, leftists (SPD, Linke) eternally languishing as third parties, and an untouchable AfD Bloc DDRois?)

[Estrella]

Her harelip attracted national attention last February when she unveiled her antidemocratic and anti-social behavior by hurling a bouquet at legally-elected Governor Thomas Kemmerich's feet.

Nothing wrong or antidemocratic or antisocial about protesting someone who collaborated with Nazis to get power.

Even if you consider the AfD Nazis, Kemmerich has never supped with the AfD. Kemmerich stood for election - and he was eventually elected in a Democratic way.
The harelip reacted snitty, not on ideological grounds, but merely because her party didn't win the vote for Governor, thus not being able to plant their own tax-eating ministers into the government.
SHW's behavior was simply childish and Trumpish, especially considering the facts that her openly lef-wing extremist party murdered over 300 innocent people, directly or indirectly, and brutally tortured their fellow citizens, and that most of their voters and party members glorify the GDR despotism and the RAF terrorist attacks (just recently on Twitter #GrundgedankenDerRAF) and blatantly want to restore communism and flagrantly promote the use of violence by the Antifa goons. 🤬

1. I wish I had a dime for every time you write some variation on this phrase.

2. Your description of Die Linke is absolutely hilarious.

3. There are many phrases one can use to describe a person whose obsession leads them to shove their hatred of an ideology into quite literally everything they write and repeatedly insult their ideological enemies' birth defects. "Mentally well-adjusted" is not one of them.

[Estrella]

Note: the party being described in the second paragraph is Germany's Die Linke.

Even if you consider the AfD Nazis, Kemmerich has never supped with the AfD. Kemmerich stood for election - and he was eventually elected in a Democratic way.
The harelip reacted snitty, not on ideological grounds, but merely because her party didn't win the vote for Governor, thus not being able to plant their own tax-eating ministers into the government.
SHW's behavior was simply childish and Trumpish, especially considering the facts that her openly lef-wing extremist party murdered over 300 innocent people, directly or indirectly, and brutally tortured their fellow citizens, and that most of their voters and party members glorify the GDR despotism and the RAF terrorist attacks (just recently on Twitter #GrundgedankenDerRAF) and blatantly want to restore communism and flagrantly promote the use of violence by the Antifa goons. 🤬

Opposing violence and murder phantasies by a paramilitary guerilla, an anti-constitutional party, and a brutal dictatorship and an anti-constitutional party is supposed to be "absurd/ignorant". Maybe you consider acknowledging that the vast majority of the Occident, including the vast majority of the Left, which I myself ascribe to, opposes left-wing extremism steadfastly. I goddit...

Replying to this here because I don't want to derail that thread.

Do you happen to be an SPD voter or member? Because that would confirm all my prejudices about that party lmao.

(Also, broad generalizations about "Occident" and suchlike... they don't necessarily mean anything, but they tend to indicate a certain type of ideology, one whose name you are very fond of using yourself)

[Estrella]

It fell under the radar, but besides CDU, CSU, SPD, AfD, FDP, Left and Greens we might see another party entering the Bundestag in September. The South Schleswig Voter Federation (SSW), the minority party of Danes and Frisians which runs in Schleswig-Holstein local and state election, decided to participate in the federal elections for the first time since 1961.

They are excepted from the 5 percent threshold and just need to cling over the "natural threshold" required to get Bundestag seats, which equivales about 45,000-50,000 votes. They have a chance to do so, in the last state elections they received 49,000 votes.

SSW is nominally centrist but leans more to the left as the party governed from 2012 until 2017 in a "Danish traffic light" coalition in S-H together with SPD and Greens.

Btw, in theory, two other parties could benefit from this rule: The "Lusatian Alliance" (representing Sorbians) and the "The Frisians" party, representing Frisians specifically. On federal level, they would be excepted from the threshold too, but as neither party had statewide electoral success (LA is excepted from the threshold in Brandenburg only but never ran in state elections, The Frisians never got over 0.x % - Both parties have some local representation though), it seems extremely unlikely they'll run.

What exactly does that mean? Is it ¹/₅₉₈ (the minimum number of Bundestag seats), or just list seats, or total number of seats after overhangs, or how does it work?

[Estrella]

Related to the Saxony discussion, from Wiki:

Also, why the SPD strength in Brandenburg, and in such a sharply defined area? I know their later results are thanks to a popular Minister-President, but this was just a couple months after the Revolution.

[Estrella]

Ten days short.

[Estrella]

Could the AfD be banned anytime soon?

Not a chance, especially since the Constitutional Court had refused to ban the even more extreme NPD... twice.

Was "they have more Verfassungsschutz agents than genuine members" (or something along those lines) just an exaggeration/meme, or the actual reason for NPD remaning legal?

[Estrella]

tfw a Die Linke politician refuses to take up her seat because Die Linke isn't Putinist enough for her

Linke politician Buchholz does not want to take up a mandate in the Bundestag. She cites the Left Party's failures in terms of peace policy and in the fight against anti-Muslim racism as the reason

The Hessian left-wing politician Christine Buchholz won a Bundestag mandate in the Berlin repeat election on Sunday . She could therefore enter parliament. However, Buchholz does not want to accept the mandate and justifies this with criticism of the political line of the Left Party and its parliamentary group. The Hessian left-wing politician Jörg Cezanne will now take her place in the Bundestag.

"The developments of the last few years have repeatedly brought me into conflict with the majority line of the party and the parliamentary group." This concerns, in their opinion, an overly defensive approach to criticism of NATO and the German role in the war over Ukraine as well as "their failure to criticize German support for Israel's war in Gaza."

In the repeat election in Berlin, the Left absolutely lost votes due to the lower voter turnout compared to 2021. Because of the complicated calculation of the mandates, the Hessian state list of the Left gains a mandate at the expense of the Berlin state list. The economic expert Pascal Meiser is therefore losing his seat. The next place on the Hessian state list is held by Jörg Cezanne, who sat for the Left in the Bundestag until 2021 and has since been an employee in the Bundestag office of the Left Chairwoman Janine Wissler.