German Elections & Politics

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By the way, guys, you can take part in my Wahl-O-mat series. Links are in my signature.

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The current speaker of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, is not running for a Bundestag seat again.
Does anybody want to guess who will become his successor?

Maybe Thomas de Maizière? Joachim Herrmann will certainly take his place as interior minister.
Uschi? She won't be the defense minister any longer after annoying half of the Bundeswehr staff.
The asexual jabba? But who could fulfill (höhö) his role as Merkel's best friend and secretary?
Or maybe a CSU member? However, CSU caucus whip Gerda Hasselfeldt won't run again for a seat.

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Far-right German candidate promises to get rid of Arabic numerals

LOL. Sounds like an election slogan from DIE PARTEI.

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I have a question about overhang seats.

I understand that if a party wins more first vote constituency seats than their second vote entitlement of seats in any state/lander, then there will be extra compensatory seats for all other parties awarded to their lander list.

If that is so, doesn't that mean if a lander has an accidental overhang then that lander will get more seats then they are entitled to.

Or do I have this wrong?

No. It's quite complicated.
You probably assume that a Land has its own determined number of seats. But in reality, the votes are allocated differently.

First of all, you have to calculate how many seats - according to their second vote figure - a party gets for the whole federal territory. Then you have to take a look at where that party got their votes from:
100 seats are entitled to Party X in total; 60% of the party's votes come from Land A, 30% from Land B, 10% from Land C. Hence, Party X sends 60 party members from Land A to the Bundestag, 30 party members from Land B, and 10 party members from Land C.
If Party X has already won 25 direct seats in Land B, the remaining seats are filled up by 5 members of Land B's party list.
If Party X has already won 12 seat in Land C, they retain the two additional seats - the Überhangmandate ("overhang seats") -, and the number of the Bundestag members will increase by 2.

That method has been ruled unconstitutional by the Bundesverfassungsgericht ("Supreme Court") in 2008 due to the "negative weighting of votes"; that means if you didn't have voted for a certain party, they could have gotten even more seats. Plus, like in 2009 it is possible that a coalition gets more seats in the parliament than they got votes in the election.

Since the last election, the number of the total seats of the Bundestag has to be raised in such a way that Party X theoretically receives 12 seats from Land C via second vote (which are then, of course, set off against the direct seats). The additional additional seats are called Ausgleichsmandate ("compensation mandates").

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Wow! Awesome website! 👍🏻

It also shows which candidates would receive a Bundestag seat, distinguishing between direct mandates and list mandates. Strangely, it doesn't show which AfD politicians would be elected to parliament...

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No. It's quite complicated....

Thank you for the explanation. It is much appreciated.

There are two more things to be added, in case you haven't known them yet:
You can vote for different parties for Erststimme and Zweitstimme. That's what the FDP tried to convince their potential supporters of: Erststimme CDU/CSU, Zweitstimme FDP; for a long time quite successful, the last time they failed miserably with that strategy.
Furthermore, independent candidates can only run for a direct mandate or be a member of a party list, but they cannot run for second votes.

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Here is a map about the polls of the direct mandates on the basis of different pollsters.

https://wahl.tagesspiegel.de/2017/karten/direktmandate

Here's the latest Emnid poll:

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On your other point, does the FDP not run for constituency seats at all?

They do. But they have absolutely no chance of winning a direct mandate at all. The last Free Democrat to win a constituency was Uwe Lühr in Saxony-Anhalt in 1990.
Right-wing extremist parties like the NPD or the dissolved DVU often only ran for second votes, mainly because they feared that their votes may be too dumb to know of the difference between first and second vote.
The NPD also tried to run a Zweitstimmenkampagne ("second vote campaign") in the last Landtag election like the FDP used to do - just with the difference that they told their supporters to give them their second vote and their first vote to the AfD, which was enraged by this campaign, firstly because of the importance of the second vote and secondly because of their feared image damage.

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This map shows the strongholds of the five big traditional parties in the last six federal elections.
A stronghold of a major party (CDU, CSU, SPD, Linke in EG) is defined as a constituency where they received more than 10 percentage points above the national result.
For the definition of a stronghold of a minor party (Linke in WG, Grüne, FDP) they used 5 percentage points.

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By the way, this topic has surpassed the France 2012 election thread in views and is now the most-viewed thread on the International Elections board ever. 🤗🏆

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By the way, this topic has surpassed the France 2012 election thread in views and is now the most-viewed thread on the International Elections board ever. 🤗🏆

France 2017 got deleted tho.

If we add up "Austrian Politics" 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 - this combined megathread would have 480.000 views, compared to 300.000 for the German thread.

And how many thousand posts are by you?

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What happened to the Bavarian who opened this thread?

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BREAKING NEWS

The leaders of each Bundestag faction have agreed on extending the four-years legislative periods to five years. The bill to change the length of a term is expected to be passed in the next session of the Bundestag and is to become effective after the 2021 election.

TL;DR: AfD +10%

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I did not expect an AFD resurgence. What happened? It doesn't look like cdu voters are going to them. Are there a bunch of SPD AFD swing voters? It doesn't look like the left is getting the same bump

Hope this helps:



40% say: The AfD doesn't fix any problems, but calls things as they are.
40% also say: The AfD exists to change the government's asylum policy.
21% say: I'd approve of the AfD entering the Bundestag.

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Did a prominent AfD member really just say that the Germans should be proud of what they did in both World Wars?

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2017/09/14/afd---wees-fier-op-wat-duitse-soldaten-deden-in-de-twee-wereldoo/

Yes, Gauland did.

Also, what kind of scores have the FDP achieved in East Germany in the past? Have they ever had a real surge in support there?

The FDP used to be quite successful in Saxony-Anhalt because of Hans-Dietrich Genscher's birthplace Halle; he was so popular there that an FDP politician, Uwe Lühr, could win a direct seat - in the Halle district - the last one for that party in the whole of Germany. In 1990, they received 13.5% in the Landtag election and in 2002 they got 13.3%.

Best results for the FDP for each East German state in a Landtag election:

Saxony: 10.0% in 2009 (The SPD received 10.4% in that election. ROFL)
Thuringia: 9.3% in 1990
Brandenburg: 7.2% in 2009
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: 5.5% in 1990
Berlin (after Reunification): 9.9% in 2001

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Here is the complete list of my Wahl-O-Mat series.
It'd be nice if y'all could participate in it, especially in the latest questions since there has been a mysteriously sharp decline in voters lately. :-

Questions 1-3: counter-terrorism/diesel taxation/refugee limit 37 voters
Questions 4-6: renewable energy/public housing/BAföG 27 voters
Questions 7-9: video surveillance/Greece/speed limit 27 voters
Questions 10-12: defense budget/fake news/organic farming 25 voters
Questions 13-15: child benefits/employment contracts/vaccination 24 voters
Questions 16-18: banks/the Holocaust/budget surplus 30 voters
Questions 19-21: farm animals/lignite mining/subcontracted labor 25 voters
Questions 22-24: dual citizenship/pensionable age/Deutschmark 18 voters
Questions 25-27: female quota/capital tax/defense of infancy 14 voters
Questions 28-30: health insurance/right-wing extremism/real estate tax 18 voters
Questions 31-33: arms exports/cannabis/solidary pact II 12 voters
Questions 34-36: integration of refugees/all-day care/reference to God 10 voters
Questions 37+38: UBI/EU (too early to call)

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ZDF proves, again, that they are way more left-wing than ARD...

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"Why is the left breast bigger?"

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I just made a compilation of the questions German voters ask Google. Especially liked the ones for the Greens. "Warum sind die Grünen gegen Deutschland?"

Thanks for the chart, but please DO NOT USE imgur in future posts. It doesn't work here.

Use imgbb

Funnily it worked for a second, but then the pic disappeared...

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I actually think there's a decent chance Die PARTEI AfD-2013s this, as in performing best of the minor parties and then spinning that into a surge where they can get in to the various Landtags that are having elections next. Whether they decay quickly like the Pirates did or stick around, like the Greens and AfD, would remain to be seen.

Not gonna happen. They're a joke party and everybody knows it, even those who vote for them. Their maximum potential under the best of circumstances probably lies at around 2%.

Exactly. During the 2014 European elections, when the voter-turnout was extremely low in Germany (48.1%), where the 3% threshold had just been abolished, the PARTEI only received 0.6% of the vote, which was barely sufficient to win one single seat in the European Parliament.

But there is indeed a tiny chance that the PARTEI will be represented in the next Bundestag...

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Exactly. During the 2014 European elections, when the voter-turnout was extremely low in Germany (48.1%), where the 3% threshold had just been abolished, the PARTEI only received 0.6% of the vote, which was barely sufficient to win one single seat in the European Parliament.

But there is indeed a tiny chance that the PARTEI will be represented in the next Bundestag...

 
  
You write that as if 0,6% were a bad result. In the German election only a year earlier they received only 0,18% of the votes. Now people talk about 2% already. Die PARTEI exists since 2004 and they have only gained with each election. I don't see that changing anytime soon. Especially if we go into a next Grand Coalition.

The gain in votes in the European election stemmed from the decrease in voter turnout compared against the last Bundestag election.
I do believe like you that the PARTEI may become the eighth-biggest party, but the user assumed that they could "AfD-2013" (nice neologism btw) their results, and that is imho out of reach.

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Here are the results of the Wahl-O-Mat:
https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=272895

Take a guess on which party is the best fit for this forum...

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Here are the results of the Wahl-O-Mat:
https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=272895

Take a guess on which party is the best fit for this forum...

NPD?

No. AfD, NPD and die Rechte aren't well-received by the forum at all.

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Big, if true.

But the FDP is.

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What is YouGov’s track record with Germany’s Elections?

From what I understand, INSA and YouGov collaborated back in 2013.
These are the results from their poll three days before the election:

Union: SPD: Linke: Grüne: FDP: AfD: Piraten:

41.5% 25.7% 8.6% 8.4% 4.8% 4.7% 2.2%

(+3.5%) (-2.3%) (-0.4%) (+0.4%) (-1.2%) (-0.3%) (+0.2%)

By the way, INSA/YouGov (along with Allensbach) prediction was the closest to the actual result of the AfD.

INSA/YouGov: election result: Allensbach: Emnid: Forsa: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen: GMS: Infratest dimap:

5% 4.7% 4.5% 4% 4% 4% 3% 2.5%