🇩🇪 German state & local elections

[Estrella]

How has the Hamburg SPD managed to stay so relatively strong when the SPD is hemorrhaging across the country? I know Hamburg has been an SPD stronghold for a long, long time, but is there anything else? Is the Hamburg SPD just uniquely competent and popular? Is it their leader?

And a related question - why have CDU fallen so hard? They won 43% of the vote as late as 2008. It doesn't really make sense that there would be many Schill -> CDU -> SPD voters, but that seems to be the case?

(edit: didn't notice Old Europe's reply while typing this)

[Estrella]

Some polling updates for the March 13 Baden-Württemberg state election: Two seperate polls from February 4 and February 5 found the Greens of Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann leading the CDU 34-27% and 34-28%, respectively. That's outside the margin of error. Kretschmann is absolutely crushing the CDU's MP candidate, Eduction Minister Susanne Eisenmann, in head-to-head polls, winning 65% and 70%, while only 13% and 16% would favor her has head of government.

Meanwhile, the SPD is stuck at 10% and 11% and the FDP at 9%. AfD at 10%, which is five points less than in 2016. No other party would clear the 5% treshold.

The major question is whether the current Green-CDU "grand coalition" will be continued after the election, or whether the Greens can form a government with the SPD again, as they did in Kretschmann's first term from 2011 to 2016. It would be close if these polls hold up, though the FDP recently expressed openess for a "Traffic light coalition" with the Greens and SPD, something they rejected in 2016. Both these options would be preferrable in my opinion and the CDU needs to be back in opposition.

What has the Kretschmann government been like policy-wise? I understand he is some sort of basically liberal centre-right conservagreen, but what does it look like in practice?

[Estrella]

Not really, just look at Thuringia. The fact that there is a negative majority there means the cordon sanitaire has 100% unambiguously failed. There is no question about that.

"Negative majority" only applies in a strictly practical sense that it makes government formation somewhat harder. Ramelow is no Thälmann and the impasse in Thuringia (which is, like a large part of German politics, only glorified kabuki) is hardly comparable to situation in Weimar Republic.

[Estrella]

Results in Trier, the city where Karl Marx was born

SPD 32.1%
CDU 21.1%
Grüne 18.7%
AfD 5.4%
FDP 5.2%
FW 4.3%
Linke 5.0%

He would be happy with the result, because his city voted on the left of the average of the state

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/landtagswahl-in-rheinland-pfalz-2021-karte-zeigt-hochburgen-der-spd-und-cdu-a-87fc0207-29d0-45ea-887e-60c3f647e8b1

That was the result for the district of Trier, which is not fully congruent with the city of Trier (some outer parts of the town belong to another district). In the town itself, the Left failed to cross a hypothetical 5 % threshold with 4.7 % (https://wahlen2021.rlp.de/de/ltw/wahlen/2021/ergebnisse/0002110000000.html).

I've learned I shouldn't ask this question about German local government, but what's the point?

edit: the results page also calls it a "kresifreie Stadt", which... huh?

[Estrella]

Results in Trier, the city where Karl Marx was born

SPD 32.1%
CDU 21.1%
Grüne 18.7%
AfD 5.4%
FDP 5.2%
FW 4.3%
Linke 5.0%

He would be happy with the result, because his city voted on the left of the average of the state

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/landtagswahl-in-rheinland-pfalz-2021-karte-zeigt-hochburgen-der-spd-und-cdu-a-87fc0207-29d0-45ea-887e-60c3f647e8b1

That was the result for the district of Trier, which is not fully congruent with the city of Trier (some outer parts of the town belong to another district). In the town itself, the Left failed to cross a hypothetical 5 % threshold with 4.7 % (https://wahlen2021.rlp.de/de/ltw/wahlen/2021/ergebnisse/0002110000000.html).

I've learned I shouldn't ask this question about German local government, but what's the point?

edit: the results page also calls it a "kresifreie Stadt", which... huh?

Oops, well, I prefer to use "district" over "constituency" in an American secular blog.

The city of Trier is "kreisfrei", so it is comparable to an independent city in the US. The Kreise - which are comparable to counties - are occasionally called districts too, but I referred to the constituency of Trier. The city itself is too large to be encompassed in one constituency, so parts of it belong to another one.

And in the constituency (that's the Spiegel Online Map) of Trier, the Left scored 5.0 %, but in the whole town of which some parts are located in another constituency, the Left got only 4.7 % of the votes.

I should use proper terms in the future to avoid confusions, German local government on County level isn't all that difficult. There are counties (Kreise) and independent cities (kreisfreie Städte), plus three "Kommunalverbände besonderer Art" (special type of county where an independent city was merged with a county - I happen to live in one out of those three ).

Thanks! I was just confused because I thought that district = Kreis.

My introduction to German local government was minionofmidas' thread on AAD about Frankfurt municipal politics and Ausländerbeirate, so I guess jumped in at the deep end

[Estrella]

snippy snip

I hope that helped.

Thank you, it did

[Estrella]

People here probably know, but right after WW2, Saarland was briefly a kinda-sorta-not-really part of France. During this time, the Saar Territory held two elections for its legislature - in 1947 and 1952. From nanwe01 on Deviantart (who seems to have posted here but was last active in 2019 ), their maps:

[Estrella]

Would a one-seat majority for SPD be workable? It's Germany, so at first I thought it would, but Saarland seems to be... special.

[Estrella]

Is there any person who can stop decline of Left?

A necromancer?

At its core, Die Linke is a nationalist party, except that the country whose national interest they put above all else doesn't exist. Of course such a party will get in trouble when SED apparatchiks, people who dreamed of being SED apparatchiks and anyone who remembers GDR start dying off. Eventually enough members of the party will come from the right side of the Wall and a transformation into a more-or-less normal left-wing party will be possible, but that's not guaranteed either. Plenty of Wessi Linke politicians (Sevim Dağdelen is the most prominent example) come off like their dream job is writing editorials for Great Purge-era Pravda.

[Estrella]

CDU meanwhile introduced their cabinet positions, among them music manager Joe Chialo as senator for cultural affair. He hasn't served in public office before and would be the second black state cabinet member in Germany.