2012 Elections in Germany

[minionofmidas]

Besides, I approve of his dining habits.

Tatchouop lives on a diet of hot water, honey, lemons, apple cider vinegar and almonds. I kid you not.

[minionofmidas]

Certainly so.

If we could have the second round map on the day after the first round is held, that would be particularly nice. -_-

[minionofmidas]

You know, I found a voter notification card on the street for someone with a Romanian-sounding surname living in a building with lots of single room apartments and a largely transient population. The mailbox with his name on is overflowing and there's no doorbell with his name. I guess he's moved away and the apartment's not been re-let yet.

I was momentarily tempted to request a postal ballot sent to some friend's address with the thing (couldn't have used my own very well since I think that'd be a tad suspicious, being on the very next block and all) but I fought it down. And stuffed it right back into the full mailbox.

[minionofmidas]

lol@ internet userpolls.

On the FNP website...

Schmitt 44%
Fechter 20%
Feldmann 15%
Rhein 8%
Förster 5%
Wißler 3%
Heilig 3%

ahem.

Also, shame that Janine Wißler is not her second cousin Janina Wißler.

[minionofmidas]

Postal turnout up almost 50% on 2007. Mind you, that's on 2007.

[minionofmidas]

At Frankfurt Hbf after having been in Bockenheim. The election seems to be running peacefully.

Yeah, I didn't see any other voters at a quarter to ten. Not surprising, mind.

Some fun stats on Booming Frankfurt (lol)

464k registered voters (up 28k on 2007)
of which 58k not German citizens (but citizens of another EU country; otherwise they would not be allowed to vote) (up 11k)
voters under 35 125k (up 20k)
voters over 60 134k (up 1k)
...and now for something that doesn't fit with the above...
voters 45-59 119k (up 13k)
voters 35-44k 86k (down 6k)
Now ask yourself: who's turned 45 since 2007? Ah, right. The last few actual baby boomers (who're younger than the people usually associated with the term, and in turn younger in Germany than in the US.)



EDIT: I'll learn quoting wikipedia images correctly yet. One day.

and some numbers on the foreigner increase...

from pre-2004 member states 36k (up 600), including 12k Italians, 5500 Greeks, etc pp
from the 2004 Ten 14k (up 2700) including 10k Poles (up 2000)
from Romania 4200 (up 2900), from Bulgaria 3700 (up 2800).

[minionofmidas]

And I've left Frankfurt (and am going through that godawful state of R-P at present), but Frankfurt looked very quiet and gray on this Sunday morning.

Doesn't really matter, as a run-off seems certain.

Not warm, not cold, not rainy, not sunny. It's the kind of weather turnout operations hope for on a polling day, except that they basically don't exist in Germany of course.

Just checking my numbers and found what seemed like an error as the increase in foreign voters summed didn't add up with the numbers at the bottom. a) the breakdown by country, for either year, comes from a slightly different source with a slightly different timestamp. b) and this is the real reason, Romania and Bulgaria were admitted to the European Union less than 30 days before the 2007 election (27 days to be exact) and it seems that Romanians and Bulgarians were either not allowed to vote in that or - more likely given what I know of German voter registration law - actually were allowed to vote but for formal reasons could not be included on the preliminary register released 30 days before the election. Which is the 2007 comparison point because of course the 2012 figures are also from the preliminary register.

[minionofmidas]

Nein zu Rhein - Rhein rhaus!

[minionofmidas]

Rhein (CDU) 39.1
Feldmann (SPD) 33.0
Heilig (Greens) 14.0
Fechter (FAG) 4.0
Wißler (Left) 3.8
Förster (Pirate) 3.8
Schmitt (PARTEI) 1.8
Tatchoup (i) 0.2
Frenzel (i) 0.2
Schulte (i) 0.1
Turnout: Abysmal. (37.5%, which probably means that the number of day voters was virtually unchanged on 2007.)

Not a done deal, but my money's very much on Feldmann for the runoff.

[minionofmidas]

http://www.wahlen.frankfurt.de/

Some odd patterns here. Along with some known or guessable patterns, of course.

[minionofmidas]

Despite that could-be-worse result, Heilig didn't win a single precinct.

Fairly strong gap between absentee and day result:

Day Rhein 37.1, Feldmann 34.2
Absentee Rhein 45.9, Feldmann 25.8
These percentages are of votes cast, not valid votes - not going to sum all candidates across all absentee precincts to find out the valid vote total breakdown.
Put another way, absentees were 18.3% of all votes, cast, 21.7% of Rhein's and 14.4% of Feldmann's.
Put yet another way, 61% of Rhein's margin of victory was accrued before polling day.
But I guess that happens when there's only one rightwing candidate.

[minionofmidas]

And the Green infighting now is funny, though all the quoted people's opinions are utterly predictable:

Cunitz, Sorge - pro Rhein
Heilig, Nouripour - anti any endorsement (read: will be voting for Feldmann but can't say that out loud given the coalition. Certainly in Heilig's case.)
Cohn-Bendit - pro Feldmann

[minionofmidas]

Cohn-Bendit?

Isn't he French?

Cohn-Bendit is a Frankfurt icon and a Frankfurt Green older statesman / grey eminence / senile old man muttering in the background.
He's also French, of course.

[minionofmidas]

So, FAG is tha anti-airport party?
And the airport is to the south of city, I suppose?

The airport is that odd southwest corner.

The personal votes for Feldmann (Bonames, probably some influence on the Frankfurter Berg as well) and Rhein (Nieder-Eschbach, not quite as pronounced) are funny. Petra Roth did always have some such bonus in Nieder-Erlenbach as well, but none of the last SPD candidates did.
Feldmann did much better than the SPD usually does in the Green stronghold areas, of course, but that's to be expected in a persons vote. Though it also happened in the Ypsilanti election of 2008; a lot of the seeming core Green vote is explicitly Red-Green in practice. And indeed, there seems to be a bit of an income pattern to Feldmann's success among Green voters (again, as also in 2008).
Turnout in certain effed areas was atrocious; sometimes even worse than in 2007. This has a turnout-differential effect, most visibly in the Gutleut, where the new yuppie developments in Westhafen outvoted the much larger remainder of the Stadtteil; their turnout was high. Feldmann won the remainder of it.
Fechter took the same kind of share citywide as the FAG took in the 2001 and 2006 council elections, but the pattern was even more pronounced than usual. She took 7 points more than back then in Sachsenhausen S and Niederrad, even less north of the river.
The Schmitt, Förster and Wißler maps are the expected mix of macro-Green/Old PDS and Random/Protest, but what's odd is that while Schmitt's distribution is the most "Green", Förster's, not Wißler's, is the most Protest-party-like (I even ran a correlation calculation on this thing. There's next to no correlation between Heilig and Förster, but both correlate with Wißler and Schmitt. Wißler's map is also a fairly good negative of Rhein's - the strongest negative correlation in there).
Oh, and turnout turnout turnout. High in the suburbs and the Green Bobo areas. Feldmann's map looks like a reasonablish class map, unless you start looking at his share of registered voters rather than vote cast. Then... uh.

[minionofmidas]

Seems like we're gonna have early elections in Northrhine-Westphalia as well this year.

So three state elections in Germany then. NRW won't be that exicting though. As it stands now, early elections would transform the incumbent SPD/Green minority government into a SPD/Green majority government.

Wow. FDP and Left both intending to vote for an Early Christmas? How silly can it get?

[minionofmidas]

Top map is simple over/under average contrast for share of the vote (Westend S and Old Town are right on average for the Greens, actually).
Bottom map is the same... for share of the electorate.

Have a look at the SPD. I don't even know what the hell that is a map of.

[minionofmidas]

Have a look at the SPD. I don't even know what the hell that is a map of.

Stable working class areas, those RedGreen swingers and suburbs full of ex-working class people Who Have Done Well For Themselves?

I'm of half a mind - only half, mind - to describe it simply as "stable areas". It was the best description I could find. Of course, that's still excempting the special situation on the left bank.

"Suburb full ow ex-working cass people Who Have Done Well For Themselves" sounds like a description of Nieder-Eschbach.

[minionofmidas]

Presidential result complained (no wait, that's not the word I meant. Damn, what is it... ugh, this actually took me a moment. Proclaimed, of course.)

991 to 126.
Somebody look up how many faithless electors that is, I can't be bothered. 7 electors were absent. The two Pirates abstained.

[minionofmidas]

Frankfurt once again did special ballots marked by age and gender in 24 selected precincts...

here are the results. First table compares turnout with previous mayoral elections, interesting point about the electorate this time having been somewhat on the young side, comparatively:



I hope you're all aware of the reason behind the pattern of male turnout among over 60s being higher than women's? No, it's not that these old wifeys come from a world when voting was a man's thing. That was the original theory when the pattern was first discovered half a century ago, and maybe it was a factor then, but maybe it never was. It's that because female life expectancy is higher, women over 60 are on average a fair few years older than men over 60, and more of them are very old and, frequently, infirm/senile/just not capable of and interested in caring about politicians not old enough to be their children and that they first heard of when they were already old. If you'd map turnout in Germany by single year of age, it'd slowly but steadily rise and rise and rise from age 18 to approximately life expectancy, and then jump off a cliff.



The apolitical/random Pirate pattern is explained, I suppose.

[minionofmidas]

Overview on Frankfurt endorsements:
FAG - Feldmann (yesterday)
Greens - none (decided early)
Greens at Frankfurt University - Feldmann
FW - Rhein. Also late.
Left - Feldmann (no, technically they just told people to vote despite there being no good choice in order to prevent the unstomachable Rhein, without mentioning Feldmann by name )
Pirates - Feldmann. Reasonably early. Which the local papers and state broadcasting appear to have decided to suppress.

[minionofmidas]

I almost forgot there's a state election in Saarland tomorrow.

Everybody does.

[minionofmidas]

Basically the fresh elections are the price the CDU has to pay for the Grand Coalition, yeah.
Then again, who knows what happens in negotiations afterwards. We've seen quite a few surprises in recent years.

The Saar Pirates have barely been founded and didn't have any sort of program by the time the election was called. The Greens deserve to be punished for Jamaica.

[minionofmidas]

Very  strong Pirate showing. Hope the Greens snuff it.

Turnout in Frankfurt estimated at 34.5% (down 3.0 on first round)

[minionofmidas]

Hope the Greens snuff it.

Jörg Schönenborn strongly implied that they probably won't.

They always seem to treat 5.0% as just over 5% on the telly.

[minionofmidas]

Frankfurt, 50/461 precincts  in already.

Peter Feldmann 59.5%. Wtf? I guess I need to check what precincts those are.