🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[Yeahsayyeah]

Anyone have exit polls that give demographic breakdown of how votes were by age and by gender as well as if asked income?

Age
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2021-09-26-BT-DE/umfrage-alter.shtml

Employment groups
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2021-09-26-BT-DE/umfrage-job.shtml
Selbständige = self-employed
Arbeiter = Workers
Arbeitslose= unemployed
Angestellte = white collar workers
Rentner =pensioners

[Yeahsayyeah]

The SPD gain Pinneberg. Scholz will be chancellor, then. (The party winning this district got the chancellorship since 1953) *g*

[Yeahsayyeah]

I don't think anyone will bother to change the rules of procedure to deny the Left official faction status, when they would have to give them a group status anyway, as the PDS had from 1990 to 1998, that would have to include most of the same rights that a faction has.

[Yeahsayyeah]

It is soooooooo painful hearing Germans attempt to pronounce Jamaica and horrendously fail at it.

I really wish that coalition could get some different nickname just for purely auditory reasons.

If Americans just stop to even pretend to try to pronounce German names, maybe... ;-)

Whoever is interested, can hear the semi-official German pronounciation following this link:

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Jamaika

[Yeahsayyeah]

To have fun with multi-party-system election results in big cities of the east aka party system fragmentation electric boogaloo, here ist the city of Dresden

SPD: 17,7 %
AfD: 17,6 %
Greens: 16,8 %
CDU: 14,5 %
FDP: 12,0%
Left: 11,1%
Animal Protection: 1,7 %
dieBasis (anti-anti-Covid-measures): 1,7 %
Free Voters: 1,7 %
PARTEI (parody party, quite young, left-wing electorate): 1,6 %
Pirates: 0,8 %
Others: 2,7 %

[Yeahsayyeah]

I assume dieBasis cut into the AfD vote ?

Probably a bit, although the losses of the AfD are bigger than the vote share of dieBasis. On the other hand, anger about anti-covid-measures in parts of the populuation probably helped them keeping their votes together.

[Yeahsayyeah]

After I read some replies in this thread, it is important to become clear:

Die Linke IS NOT the former communists of the DDR. Die Linke was born as a merge of the PDS, which was the sucessor of the SED, and the WASG, a left-wing group that was a split of the SPD. The PDS itself was not like the SED. A minority in the PDS considered that the DDR was a very nice country.
Many Linke leaders weren't adults when the wall came down in 1989.
The SED was in the "authoritarian left" square of the political compass. Die Linke is in the "libertarian left" square. This party supported the legalization of the cannabis before all the SPD did it. Die Linke tries to be greener than the Greens, while the DDR didn't have a very good record in environment protection.
The 2021 polls showed that die Linke had 8% of the <24 vote and 4% of the >60 vote. It looks like that the old eastern Linke voters became very rare now.

Die Linke did very well in 2009, when few people had heard about Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Melechon, Pablo Iglesias and Alexis Tsipras. Germany was ahead of other high income countries in options on the left of the mainstream center-left. In the end of the 2010s, die Linke declined.

Would you consider it acceptable if only a "minority" of the AfD thought Nazi Germany was a very nice country?

Well, that's probably right. A majortiy prefers a caricature of the FRG of the early fifties or of the Empire as the place to go...

[Yeahsayyeah]

So how come Pankow swung to the Greens while places like Treptow stayed Die Linke? Is Pankow really now more gentrified than south east Berlin?

A large part of the borough of Pankow is Prenzlauer Berg and there is probably no Greener region than that. Also, Pankow never really was much of a traditional Left stronghold. Stefan Liebich won the borough three times, but he was also more of a modern/younger Left Party politician and before that it had been a SPD stonghold.

Actually, it's far more baffling that Marzahn-Hellersdorf - which had voted for PDS/Left in every single election since 1990 - went CDU this time. The AfD has cutting hard into the Left's populist vote share there, but it can't be the only explanation.

Seems to be a localist thing. The CDU candidate increased the district vote vote share by 7 per cent while the list vote share dropped by 4.5 per cent. So he beat his party vote share by 13 per cent. He was directly elected to the state parliament for the Mahlsdorf and Kaulsdorf area before. Mahrzahn-Hellersdorf isn't as dominated by "Plattenbau" estates as outsiders tend to believe. There are huge swaths of settlements with one- and two-family-housing.

[Yeahsayyeah]

ACAB & The Traffic Light Swamples

[Yeahsayyeah]

Is that small patch of strong CDU support in the northeast of the state a largely Sorbian area?

That's right, yes.

Sorbian catholic, to be precise. In 2017 one could still see the effect of catholicism in the munipality of Schirgiswalde in the southern part of the Landkreis Bautzen, which was a Bohemian enclave until 1860 or so.

[Yeahsayyeah]

So major update: According to ZEIT, cabinet positions will be allocated as follows:

SPD:
- Chancellorship and Chief of Chancellery
- Interior
- Defense
- Construction & Housing
- Labor & Social Affairs
- Health
- Economic Development

Greens:
- Economy & Climate
- Foreign
- Family Affairs
- Agriculture
- Environment & Consumer Protection

FDP:
- Finance
- Justice
- Traffic
- Education & Science

Germany has a Minister of Traffic?? Or is that the person that works the traffic lights for the coalition? (lol)

Building of federal road, Autobahnen, railroad tracks, public transport, all kind of regulatory stuff concerning vehicles, airflight and so on ... the number one word for Germans to translate "Verkehr" into English would be "traffic". This isn't right, though?

[Yeahsayyeah]

Could you elaborate on your impression?  The impression, that the coaliton agreement has much more of the FDP's handwriting in it, is much more common in Germany (and in my opinion it is warranted),

[Yeahsayyeah]

^ We all know by now, that you don't like the Greens. No need to throw unappetizing substances  out of your guts all over the board.

On a related note, Green ministers are also leading the approval polls. Which isn't to surprising.  Habeck is kind of an Ersatzkanzler who is basically doing the communication and explanation stuff related the crisis related polices as "Who's ordering leadership will get leadership" Scholz is basically invisible.

Foreign ministers have almost ever been popular. Westerwelle was the main exception from the rule (and Bärbock's predecessor Maas somehow managed to be totally invisible and inept that one could forget the ministry existed).

Özdemir is a bit more surprising as he clearly isn't front and center at the moment. This is probably more related of being palatable and non-threatening to centre-right people and having a high name recognition from being around as a more or less important political figure (and one of the first with I migrational background) for decades.

[Yeahsayyeah]

The black-green "pizza connection" of the nineties was initiated by people like Laschet, Röttgen, Altmeier, van Klaeden and the likes. People that where young at the time and at the left or center of the CDU -and some outspoken "Realo" Greens of course, like Matthias Berninger, Cem Özdemir, Volker Beck etc.

Friedrich Merz wasn't part of it and was staunchly anti-Green at the time.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Really bad proposal. As Logical said, the entire purpose of single-member constituencies is undone if the winner of a district is not elected. To combat the explosion of the number of seats, they should have introduced either an MMM system, letting go of proportionality (not sure if this would be constitutional though), or they could have simply gone for multi-member constituencies.

No, it wouldn't. The constitutional court has affirmed multiple times that the German electoral system is at heart a proportional system. If the court hadn't said this in 2011 or so, the Bundestag wouldn't have introduced compensatory seats in 2013, and we wouldn't be in this mess.

I think, compensatory seats are the best thing that ever happened to the German electoral system, but aside that, there was this whole "negative seat impact of getting more votes" angle of the Constitutional Court decision. And the mechanism which lead to that and which is directly tied to the overhang seats, was clearly bad and everybody can see, why that was unconstitutional (It only took the Court 60 decades to notice, who the electoral system worked, but whatever...).  

I'd clearly prefer a fully proportional system with open lists, so that the voters can decide which of the candidates of each party should get into the parliament. It shouldn't be decided on geographical randomness. So  I don't care that much for districts and it should have been outright abolished as it doesn't do, what it actually did since now - guaranteeing some kind of minimum of equal geographical distribution of representatives.

My main complaint is the abolition of the "Grundmandatsklausel". I don't think, that it is healthy to exclude parties via the arbitrary 5 per cent treshold that command strength in significant regions of the country.

This seems to have been a last minute decision and I don't know who pushed for it. It's clearly not necessary to make the law constitutionally sound (that was the official reasoning) as the districts still exist and have some merit.

[Yeahsayyeah]

If one considers state level polls, the surge in the last months seems especially to be fueled by breakthroughs in the big West German states where they have been quite weak historically, especially Nordrhein-Westfalen and Niedersachsen.

[Yeahsayyeah]

As the catholic/protestant cleavage has been important to shape the political landscape of Germany since the late 19th century the SPD has always been quite weak in Bavaria, historically, as their main base have been big industrial cities and at least partly industrialized protestant areas. So you have Munich, Nuremberg and surroundings and Upper Franconia, and that's basically it. Even Augsburg seems to have been never that of a stronghold.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Why would CDU and AFD loose voters to BSW?! And not SPD, Grune and Linke?!

In short, Wagenknecht is known for her anti-immigration, anti-"woke" stances, while being economically left-wing. This has put her at odds with many LINKE members, which is why she left.

That makes her sound perfect, but a bit more research shows she's pro Russia. A shame.

so it's basically the tankie party?

It's a weird mix of WASG types (ex left-social democrat), quite normal Left Party types, has-beens (Klaus Ernst, Sabine Zimmermann) and total crackpots (Andrej Hunko, Sevim Dagdelen). And six of the ten BSW Bundestag members have a migrational background. That doesn't really look like the alleged "left-wing-nationalist" approach.

Wagenknecht is a good public speaker and has some appeal. And some are looking for a left-wing-populist alternative that is also against sanctioning Russia and is for expanding the welfare state. (which BSW allegedly is).

What we see in this one poll is Wagenknecht's personal appeal and people projecting their wishes into the new formation that isn't even a party yet. What way it will go isn't even clear as German law basically demands intra-party democracy, prohibits top-down parties and makes it almost impossible to kick members out as long as they pay their membership fees.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Wagenknecht's economic views aren't so clear to me. Wasn't she part of an openly Communist faction within Die Linke? How should we see her new project's economic views vis-a-vis those of Die Linke?

Her Communist Platform days are obviously long gone. As chairwoman of the Left Party she basically argued the party line of expanding the welfare state, expanding and renovating infrastructure, strengthening unions and so on.

On the other hand she quoted Ludwig Erhard of ordoliberal/neoliberal fame at the BSW launch and the website tries to stress "moderate" economic views in the name of "reason", "classical" industrial policies, cheap fossil energy.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Will new Wagenknecht party will be cordon sanitaired by mainstream parties (CDU, FDP, SPD Greens)?

In a way, that no one wants to govern with them, at least at the federal level, because of foreign policies, probably yes. So, more like the Left Party, and not like the AfD, that gets excluded as much as possible from everything for obvious reasons.

[Yeahsayyeah]

This probably means a AFD+Waggenknecht majority in some eastern lands.

I don't think that is too likely

1. The percentage increase of the AfD in the last time has been quite universal, and if there are regional differences, they seem to have won more support in west german states.
2. If the INSA poll is correct, BSW would be pulling one third of their support from the AfD
3. We don't have any polls to see the potential regional differences in support, but as of know BSW seems more like a West German project (no Eastern Bundestag members, only one notable Left Party politician from the East, Sabine Zimmermann, who has been Left party chairwoman of Saxony for some years, Wagenknecht's power base and network in the Left party has been predominantly west German and her state party has been NRW for decades. Landtag elections in three Eastern states (Saxony, Thuringia, Brandenburg) will be in late summer/autumn 2024, already and it's far from clear, that they will get a credible organization with many credible candidates until then.

[Yeahsayyeah]

To do a paraphrase:

A poll commissioned by a magazine on a gay men dating platform (which probably isn't representative of gay men as a whole, not to mention the problem of fake accounts (e.g. for doxxing), double voting etc., has found the AfD slightly in top position in a multi-party system, with 25 per cent over 22 per cent for the CDU, that comes next, and the Greens with 20 per cent.

I don't know thy Hades thinks this is a huge gotcha for German centre-left posters, here.

Some observations:

1. I'm a bit surprised that the far-right overrepresentation at online-platforms in Germany that has gone on for decades, nowadays, even penetrates a gay men dating site, but only a bit.

2. Representativity issues aside, there is clearly a gender gap in German politics and our American posters can probably accurately guess who's voting more for whom. There has been some buzz, lately, that it was widening or would widen, especially with younger age cohorts, but there still isn't much evidence for that, apart from "vibes from the internet".

3. Alice Weidel herself is lesbian, why should she be the only one in the "Gay movement for the Fourth Reich" ;-)   ...ok, joking aside, homsoexuality is basically accepted in German mainstream culture, so you don't have to quasi-automatically align with the left-wing, just for being gay.