2013 Elections in Germany

[minionofmidas]

Has anyone tried the National-o-mat ?

http://neue-rheinpresse.de/politik/rechter-entscheidungshelfer-fuer-die-bundestagswahl-2013-der-national-o-mat-ist-da

Helping right-wingers find their ideal party ...

This. is. hilarious.

[minionofmidas]

The oldest candidate is 90 year old Imanuel Regehly, a former actor and Silesian refugees' functionary who's been running for the NPD off and on since 1976. He's on their Berlin state list once again. I could not find a picture.

The youngest candidate is 18 year old Vanessa Mariacher who is running for the fringe Bayernpartei (in, duh, Bavaria). She's also running for the state election the previous week.



(An apparently self-written portrait on the party's website consists of 'nanny-statism' cliches and the claim she's turning 18 right in time for the election, so it's conceivable she's 17 as of the time of this writing.)

[minionofmidas]

4 or 6 TV channels will show it live.

5.

[minionofmidas]

Typical. Put the prime boredom on at primetime.

[minionofmidas]

Federal wahlomat is online.

http://www.bpb.de/politik/wahlen/wahl-o-mat/bundestagswahl-2013/

unweighted result
Left 81.6%
Greens 80.3%
Pirates 76.3%
SPD 64.5%
FDP 46.1%
NPD 43.4%
AfD 42.1%
CDU/CSU 39.5%

[minionofmidas]

A yearly thread is a tradition by now. https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=88097.0

But in 2009, we split off a separate federal "results" thread. https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=102862.0

There is, of course, a major difference in that the federal election was the last election of the year, but I suggest we follow that. In which case maps and stuff for the state elections still go here.

[minionofmidas]

German commentators agreed that Merkel had her weakest point when it came to the NSA affair, where she acted anything but convincingly.

It helps that that question was late in the debate.

[minionofmidas]

Le Monde concurs with the polls: a draw. Am I the only one surprised that Steinbruck didn't gaffe? Then again, he's basically run out of demographics to offend.

Pro tip from Peer Steinbrück for you: If you're a robotic nincompoop and are trying to combat the impression that you're a robotic nincompoop, debate an even more robotic nincompoop.

[minionofmidas]

I only watched snippets of the debate and didn't notice the thing. But didn't she wear that same Belgian talmi chain to some football event ages ago?

[minionofmidas]

The man didn't get a glass of wine throughout the debate. He did pretty well considering he was DTing.










j/k, I didn't watch it.

[minionofmidas]

Steinbrück vs Brüderle would have been the reasonable debate to have. Seeing as they're contending for the post of Merkel-enabler.

[minionofmidas]

Ude also supports the wrong football club in Munich or Bayern ... TSV 1860 München - not Bayern München ...

That's actually the right club to support in Munich (hence his mayoral career there ) though not in exurbia.

New Forsa poll for the Hesse election shows CDU-FDP ahead by a point for the first time in ages. Granted, it's Forsa - whose previous poll from six weeks ago was the only one so far to show it tied - but evidently it's very necessary that the Left makes it over 5.

[minionofmidas]

The polling trend over the campaign has certainly been for the Greens to lose and lose, to SPD and Left, and everything else being basically stable.

[minionofmidas]

That reminds me of 1998.

Of course, the study commission on the pedophilia thing's result is basically "we got the wrong party - that was the FDP".

There's other, underlying factors of course. There's a lot of only vaguely disaffected center-right middle-class ever-voters who'll vote SPD or Greens in a second-order (state, local) election but are coming home federally - and a lot of them told pollsters they would vote Green federally post-Fukushima. Meanwhile the Greens aren't attracting all that many of those people only now tuning in.

[minionofmidas]

The fake-distribute-among-the-states-first* extra step was what the CDU thought up to arguably get around the (first) SC verdict. It didn't work. As anyone with good verdict-reading skills could have told them in advance. It's funny that it made it into the final compromise.
The final law means that the parties' national seat tallies will from now on be proportional, the seat distribution between states will not become proportional, the intra-state distribution between parties will not become proportional (but closer to it) in states where there is overhang, and will cease to be proportional in states where there isn't - the party that has overhang elsewhere now being underrepresented in these states - and the intra-party distribution between states will remain proportional for parties that have no overhang, and will remain unproportional for parties that have them. However, and crucially for CDU support, it will not become worse - unlike the quick fix the Greens' had suggested at the time of the first verdict, which otherwise shares all these characteristics without blowing up parliament like a balloon (on a 2009 rerun or worse. Which it doesn't actually look like happening; the CDU looks like increasing its share of the vote without increasing its share of the direct seats.) Indeed, the NRW or Lower Saxony CDU will continue to have a seat number proportional to their vote and the nominal (rather than actual) size of parliament, it just happens that these two will diverge further than in the past.


*note that only the federal sum from this distribution is guaranteed, not the per-state. On 2009 numbers, CDU Saxony-Anhalt gains an extra seat compared to the the real result on the first step, then loses it to some western state in step 5. Producing an extra CDU seat in step 3 and four extra equalization mandates, for SPD, FDP, Left and CSU, in step 4.

[minionofmidas]

So basically the final result will be a proportional carve-out of all parties that get 5% or more, but the final number of MPs might be over 598 if some parties get an overhang.

Yes. (5% and/or three direct seats.)

[minionofmidas]

Some local CDU grandee would stand. The vote split might kick the seat to the SPD. Worse, in a little known quirk of German election law, should the independent win, his voters' list votes would be disregarded.
And, of course, the FDP would get about one percent of the list vote in those three seats - 1% of the country after all, possibly votes it can not afford to lose.

But yeah, the real reason is that back in the 50s when such deals were occasionally tried, they were viewed (and, in the 60s - by now they're long forgotten - remembered) as attempts to rig the election. And of course there's the CDU and SPD (not so much CSU, interestingly) custom, which I'm not sure how old it is but is only now slowly - and I stress slowly - falling into abeisance - of reserving the first n seats on the list to the constituency direct candidates, n being the number of direct seats available. In the states as well as federally. Because otherwise that constituency party has been wronged and ignored, you see. (Really the effect, the intended as well as the resulting effect, is to ensure that there are, for instance, CDU MdBs from the Ruhr. And that its constituency parties there do not fall to the same joke level as Labour's in the Home Counties.)

[minionofmidas]

There would be an even easier solution to that: End the charade of having the FDP around. (You'd probably not be losing a statistically significant number of votes that way. Some economically conservative gays, and, well, that's it. There are other people who genuinely prefer the FDP, of course, but their second choice should be not in doubt.)

[minionofmidas]

More to the point, would Left voters have voted SPD in 2009 if the Left had not been around?
Some of them. More would have scattered all over the "others" or just stayed home.

Of course, not all the FDP extra voters from when parts of the country thought it hip (god, was that just four years ago?) would have voted CDU otherwise either. Especially in the East (in the West, it's pretty clear that almost all of them would have. Though they were anything but a representative sample of CDU supporters).

[minionofmidas]

That's actually random slices of Baden-Württemberg, Catholic and Protestant alike, and the poshest parts of suburban West Germany.



Indeed... apart from the suburbs (but they are a relatively Catholic part of Hesse, as a matter of fact. And not only because of the incomers' majority, either, but ancestrally as well) and Waldeck (now THAT's a bizarre resurgence of traditional FDP-as-Protestant-Conservatives votes, though not one due to neighborhood of Catholics) the right half of this image is, basically, a map of Catholicism in Hesse.

[minionofmidas]

And it shows up in Norther/Central Baden-Württemberg.

Odenwald-Tauber being, of course, not only more Catholic but also much more rural (out of easy commute reach, unlike anywhere south. The road network playing a role in keeping the western half of the constituency remote - no motorways here) and, of course, very largely in Baden. Though no Baden vs Württemberg boundary shows up in the south.

[minionofmidas]

Catholic lakeside Baden is traditional DDP / DVP (the 1868-1910 DVP that is) stronghold country. Of course these Democrats were always Catholics (though they may well have been the smalltownfolk as opposed to the yeomanry. I don't have any numbers on that.)

[minionofmidas]

And I thought Steinbrück and his party accused Merkel of being superficial in her election campaign.

You certainly couldn't accuse her of introducing politics into the election campaign, so they'll have to try something else.

[minionofmidas]

The Süddeutsche decision to put it on the cover might have something to do with that.

[minionofmidas]

"for lack of alternatives"? That would mean either that the Greens have overtaken the SPD (and a classical Grand Coalition has no majority). Or that CDU-SPD negotiations have previously failed somehow, which is hard to imagine without a secret bidding war as to who can fall over the hardest going on at the same time.