🇩🇪 German elections (federal & EU level)

[DL]

New poll for the federal election:



Man, I hate the multi-party system, when none is polling above 30%. Too many parties!

Wow, the Right lead over Left has been reduced to 1 (48-47)

Yes but the greens have moved so hard to the centre that they can hardly be described as "left". A red-red-green coalition is nothing but a wet dream as nobody outside the Jusos and die linke wants it, the only possible constellations are red-black and black-yellow-green.
Indeed the Greens have become so bürgerlich (bourgeois) that their Voters are the second richest behind the FDP!

If this poll was the result of the election Black/Red would not have a majority! Could we see Black/Green?

[DL]

Any word on who will form government in Bremen?

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Have their been any polls comparing how people would vote if the CDU chancellor candidate is Laschet vs if it is Soder?

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If by chance the Greens edged out the CDU and were the largest party would the CDU be willing to be a junior partner in a Green led coalition with a Green chancellor?

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Newest poll by Kantar is quite something!

Union: 22% (-2% since the last poll)
Greens: 21% (-1%)
SPD: 19% (+1%)
FDP: 12% (-1%)
AfD: 11% (no change)
The LEFT: 7% (+1%)

is it a given that whoever has the largest number of seats between Union, Greens and SPD - likely provides the new chancellor? I'm actually surprised the Greens are even still in the game - seems inevitable that the SPD will overtake them by September and then the "ballot question" becomes - who do you want as chancellor? Laschet or Scholz?

[DL]

I feel that "best chancellor" is a bit of a leading indicator question in polling and that eventually vote preference will fall in line with who people want as Chancellor. The SPD has no where to go but up!

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Now that that SPD is clearly overtaking the Greens and Scholz has such skyrocket Ing popularity it seems inevitable to me that you’re going to start seeing a big shift of Green votes to the SPD. A lot of people who have been telling pollsters they would vote Green in recent years are left of centre former SPD voters any ways. A month from now I’ll bet the Greens will be polling at 13-14%

[DL]

According to this poll the SPD has now pulled dead even with the CDU. I think Scholz will be the next chancellor

https://twitter.com/electsworld/status/1428006070950244356?s=21

[DL]

If the SPD ends up being the largest party, what coalition could Scholz form? Would the CDU be willing to be the junior partner in a grand coalition? Would the FDP be willing to be a third wheel in a Traffic light coalition? Would a red-red-green all left coalition be a possibility if the math added up?

[DL]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I think vote intention is still a bit of a lagging indicator. The SPD is steadily gaining ground - but when you see Scholz having such a huge lead on "preferred chancellor" - its just a matter of time before vote intention catches up to preferred chancellor. I will bet that the SPD will end up as the largest party - it it won't be all that close.

[DL]

No matter how you ask the question, right now the proportion of Germans who think Scholz would make the best chancellor is wayyy higher than the proportion who say they would vote SPD - I think over the next Month those numbers will converge

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Very funny that the first poll to show this would be a Forsa. Anyway, that's another poll with Die Linke only just about hovering about the threshold.

I thought the 5% threshold was unlikely to ever apply to Linke since there are some exceptions for parties that win direct mandates (which the Linke always does) and/or which hit the 5% threshold in the former DDR

[DL]

Do we know much about the political pedigree of AFD voters? Who did most of them vote for before the AFD existed? are they people who used to be CDU voters or are they more ex-SPD or even ex-Linke voters?

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Don’t high profile candidates who lose their direct seats often still get seated as list members?

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This latest poll would give Red/Red/Green a clear majority (btw: is there a nickname for such a thing?). I realize that by all accounts Scholz will not want to do that and is more likely to go for a traffic light coalition, but presumably if the math is actually there for red-red-green - it puts even more pressure on the FDP to join a traffic light.

I know its not going to happen, but what would the role of Linke be if there was a RRD coalition? Since they will likely only get 6% or so of the vote they would likely only get a couple of cabinet portfolios and presumably they could minor portfolios where they could be kept out of trouble...(maybe give them agriculture and services for people with disabilities or something like that)

[DL]

Couldn't some new low impact ministeries be devised if Linke were to be part of the government. You know, make a Linke person Minister of Fitness and Amateur Sport and another can be Minister of the Arts or Roads and Highways

[DL]

Couldn't some new low impact ministeries be devised if Linke were to be part of the government. You know, make a Linke person Minister of Fitness and Amateur Sport and another can be Minister of the Arts or Roads and Highways

That's possible but that would seem like an obvious distraction. Besides, it's not quite normal in Germany to create new ministries. It's normal to add or swap tasks between ministries, but the number of ministers has not changed since 2009 and it was always something between 16 and 13 since Schröder I. Also, Scholz has on the campaign trail ridiculed competitors for "regularly trying to invent new ministries," so yeah, that's his stance on this issue.

In France they are very big on creating these very grandiose sounding but nebulous cabinet portfolios (i.e. minister of social cohesion, minister of integration of the dispossessed, minister to address alienation among youth etc...)

[DL]

Question for Germans:

Is Scholz more popular in the East than West?

So far, I have only seen polls from Eastern states which had double digit gains for the SPD - but only single digit increases in the West.

I wonder if it might be partly that since Merkel was herself from the East (Mecklenberg-Vorpommern) she had some residual "favourite daughter" appeal in the former DDR and that now that she is gone and repalced by Laschet - a lot of the CDU votes that were just personal votes for Merkel in the east are suddenly up for grabs.

[DL]

Regarding the Brandenburg poll: It might be a minor factor, but as Scholz is running as top candidate in Brandenburg, that might give him a small home state bonus, although it is probably negligible.

I thought Scholz was from the west and was once mayor of Hamburg? He may be on a list in Brandenburg for purely symbolic reasons but he is not an "Ossie" in the way Merkel is/was

[DL]

If present trends continue and the SPD rises up to the high-20s on the strength of Scholz's immense personal popularity - at whose expense does the SPD gain ground? I have to think that at 20% the CDU is near its floor - so the next most logical source of SPD votes would be from the Greens since even after some slippage they are still polling about 6-7 points about their usual level of support and I'll bet a lot of that inflated Green vote is from left of centre people who used to be SPD voters.

[DL]

Is it fair to say at this point that the only thing that stops Scholz from being the next chancellor is if (as they say in Louisiana) he is caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy

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I had heard before that the Saschiche dialect was seen as a dead give away that someone was from the DDR and that for many years West Germans associated that Saxon accent with the way the East German border guards would bark at you when crossing the DDR to get to West Berlin etc.

I don't know if I've ever heard anyone speaking the Saxon accent. I am familiar with Bavarian and I also can recognize Kolsch from Cologne...but what does Saxon sound like? 

[DL]

When British people first take an interest in German politics they tend to assume that the FDP are rather like the Liberal Democrats. When they learn a little more then tend to believe that this is nonsense, that they have little in common. When they actually understand things they know that their initial assumptions were surprisingly close to the mark.

Maybe I am giving away my age here but I had a vague impression that the FDP are social liberals because I still remember the SPD-FDP coalition government of the 70s and early 80s under Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt and how at the time and the FDP were depicted as socially liberal, civil libertarians who supported a softer line against the Soviets and the DDR

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Isn't it true that the nickname for the FDP in Germany is "the party of doctors and dentists"?

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Wasn't the FDP historically seen as the "sister party" to the FPO in Austria? The FPO has always been the repository of ex-Nazis