2013 Elections in Germany

[minionofmidas]

It's slightly ironic that a few days ago, it was rumored that Merkel might pick Loser McAllister as a replacement should Schavan be untenable... and then she goes for a loser member of his cabinet instead.

[minionofmidas]

It's slightly ironic that a few days ago, it was rumored that Merkel might pick Loser McAllister as a replacement should Schavan be untenable... and then she goes for a loser member of his cabinet instead.

Maybe she has in fact asked McAllister and he turned her down?

It has been speculated.

[minionofmidas]

Are they just hating on Gera coz it's a very GDRy place or what? Altenburgers are not going to like that either.
Most of the rest looks highly reasonable actually (including the Schmalkalden vs Meiningen split along the old line) though the two northwestern mergers needed to be aligned north-south rather than east-west.

[minionofmidas]

Are they just hating on Gera coz it's a very GDRy place or what? Altenburgers are not going to like that either.
Most of the rest looks highly reasonable actually (including the Schmalkalden vs Meiningen split along the old line) though the two northwestern mergers needed to be aligned north-south rather than east-west.

The Catholic Eichsfeld is of course unhappy to lose its "independence" and be merged with any of their Protestant neighbours

Ah, but there are some more Catholics just outside the boundaries. Towards the southeast, not towards the northeast.

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That's just as true in Hildburghausen. The Rennsteig is the dialect line. (The first time I ever met someone from the area, which I have never set foot into, I had recently heard about that and I immediately placed his accent despite having never heard it before. Franconian base + a slight touch of something easterly and some GDR-typical words. 'twasn't hard. "Sorry for asking, but are you by any chance from southern Thuringia?")

And out east I'd make three districts out of their two, with Altenburg taking only the northeastern part of Greiz (part of which is historical Altenburg anyways.) So yeah, that leaves the Altenburg district undersized, shrug. The next district to the west could be viewed as vaguely continuing the ancient country of Reuß.

[minionofmidas]

A friend of mine has the mildly amusing habit of using "Sondershausen" as an intensifying suffix. "Das ist ja eine Scheiße sondershausen."

[minionofmidas]

"Sorry for asking, but are you by any chance from southern Thuringia?")

I wasn't asking you that. I was asking that elderly drunkard I was reminiscing about above.

[minionofmidas]

So there was a mayoral election in Wiesbaden two weeks ago.

First round
Müller (CDU, i) 48.0%
Gerich (SPD) 38.4% which was more than had been expected
Green candidate 9.3%
some indy running as "Mitte" ("Center") 3.0%
another indy 1.2%
Turnout a paltry 33.6%

The Greens did endorse the Social Democrat for the runoff, but Müller was still widely expected to be reelected. Sunday's runoff result

Gerich (SPD) 50.8%
Müller (CDU, i) 49.2%
turnout 34.1%

and of Hesse's 12 Lord Mayors the CDU is down to Fulda and Rüsselsheim (SPD 7, Greens Darmstadt, a de-facto Green "Independent" in Bad Homburg, and FDP in Wetzlar - he was first elected in 1997 and has been reelected triumphally twice. Oh and in the last election in Rüsselsheim the SPD got eliminated in round one - just as in Darmstadt - and the CDU guy beat the Green 50.4-49.6 in the runoff).

[minionofmidas]

I'm late to this, but I just looked back over this thread and I'm surprised at the high level of support for gay equality among Linke voters. I thought a lot of their support was from rather socially conservative folks, but I guess not.

The existence of gay civil unions - called marriages in the vernacular and registered in just the same way as marriages (except that churchbound people have a second, church, wedding afterwards*) -  has become part of the furniture quite fast, and most unpolitical people are actually vaguely surprised to hear they're not equal in the benefits they bestow. In short, equality is the conservative option, resisting the inevitable is the reactionary option.
There's a lot of people, and possibly more among Left voters than anywhere else, who would admit to personal anti-gay prejudice while supporting equality.

*and remember, they're few and far between in the East

[minionofmidas]

Have visited my old hometown of Halle over the Easter weekend. Apparently, the first black politician** with good chances of entering the German Bundestag is running there in the September election... Senegal-born Karamba Diaby from the SPD. And in an East German district of all places.

Have we finally found our own Obama?


(** strictly speaking, Josef Winkler from the Greens surely "looks" black too.. but he's half-Indian and not African)

Really? Looks full Indian to me.



And a bow tie wearer. He probably loves Sim City, too.

[minionofmidas]

It says on Diaby's website that he has been living in Halle since 1986. I didn't know the GDR had Senegalese immigrants. Mozambiquan, yes.

[minionofmidas]

If the SPD remains as unsexy and devoid of real chance to take over the chancellorship as at current (highly likely) and interest in the elections picks up anyways to the point where turnout at least doesn't take another freefall on top of the last one (fairly likely, but far from certain) both Left and Pirates will end up several percentage points above their current polling.

[minionofmidas]

The SPD and CDU did that pension age rise together, actually.

And anybody in a blue collar profession over 40 - yes, including fairly unpolitical BILD-reading people - just wonders how the hell you can work to 67 or how a party pretending to be rooted in the working class could vote for that. If you want to pin down the SPD's problems to a single vote, it's that, not Hartz IV.

Without recalculating all the pension formulas etc, that thing was little more than a massive grab into the lower (but not lowest) pensions to finance yours.

[minionofmidas]

Oh, but it does not want to. It's just not attracting anybody else in their stead either.

Of course, what proportion of the working class person who entered work at 15* a) lived in Germany when he was 15? b) is a German citizen? c) votes? d) gets a hearing in the media?

*though it's not as if those who started working physically in their 20s - lotsa people who drift into permanent employment from student jobs after they drop out; also lotsa people who start an apprenticeship after Abitur - don't aquire the same health issues in their 50s...

Thanks to the fact that Grundsicherung is higher now (which is in itself a good thing o/c!) while few lowpaid workers have the kind of spotless employment record that helps in winning a higher pension , most working class people now in their 50s and 60s receive (sort of) welfare for the remainder of their lives. And if you're the type with traditional preconceived notions about those below you, that stings (and Lafontaine gets good rhetorical mileage out of it.)

The left wing way forward - the only one, really - is to end the charade of a "pension insurance" fund that hasn't in practive existed since 1945, understand Rentenbeiträge for what they are - nonprogressive taxes on income derived from wages - and see them abolished, counterfinanced by an increase EDIT: in the official income tax. That bit somehow got lost here. And preferrably (but this is just daydreaming, not going to happen) get everybody on a unitary government pension. And if that's not enough for you, there's private pensions. But they shouldn't be treated any different than any other investment or savings account for taxation purposes.

[minionofmidas]

d) We will need a smooth transition - already achieved entitlements are legally guaranteed and as such probably protected constitutionally.

Aye, there's the rub. Because I really don't see how you could ensure a smooth transition. And the court's just incredible record on anything income-of-the-upper-50% related over the past 20 years only makes matters worse.
So brinksmanship is all we're going to get. At best.

Which doesn't affect my original point at all. To reiterate:

The SPD and CDU did that pension age rise together, actually.

And what they did together was to sell one of the involved party's bases down the river.

[minionofmidas]

Of course a lot of the "new service workers" do get dirty actually, if not as much as we machos out on the construction sites.

Yeah, Riester's just a subsidy to the ensurance industry. And a complete failure at what it was supposed to achieve.

[minionofmidas]

No, their new, sectarianized old-left face scared protest voters.

I beg to differ. First of all, the CDU is very much a pensioners' party (just look at any study on their voter structure in terms of age & social status), so the reform touched their base as well - at least psychologically.

Make that "at most".

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Oh aye. The SPD essentially sold it as selling their base (and worse, the voters they lost to Left or nonvoters and need to get back to have a perspective at forming government without the CDU again) down the river.

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They effectively did that. The pension age is rising slowly, a month a year or whatever it is. People my parents' age and a bit younger are all going "right, so I reach retirement age at 65 years and 5 months, you at 65 years 8 months..."

[minionofmidas]

Never heard of.

[minionofmidas]

Not to mention The Violets - Party for Spiritual Politics!

[minionofmidas]

The "Party of Reason" will most likely get results comparable to the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany, the Party of Bible-abiding Christians, the Anarchist Pogo Party of Germany and many others. Funny names have been good to attract a handful of voters, but not more.

There are many potential protest parties competing, why should anyone vote for the PdV? Additionally it is not the only party competing for tea bag votes (cf. AfD).

Of course among these parties, the Marxist-Leninist one is not just a funny name for the sake of fun, it's at least historically relevant, how funny as you can find it now.

the MLPD is not historically relevant. Though the wider environment of 70's Maoist Cultism that it was founded in is.

[minionofmidas]

If Germany had been a "normal country", the Linke wouldn't exist.

If Germany had been a "normal country", the Communist tradition would not have disappeared as near totally as it did, nor would there ever have been a threshold this high (its main, though not its sole, historic purpose is to Parliament Commie-free), so yeah of course it would exist.

[minionofmidas]

Of course a far-left party would exist...but the specific circumstances surrounding Linke are a direct result of German history.

This is correct.

Of course if Germany were a normal country and Scandinavia is what we define as "normal" ... it wouldn't be just one country (nor just two, counting Austria) so the whole point is moot.

[minionofmidas]

After 1945, Germany was for the time being abolished and parallel state parties emerged in the different states, although in the case of the "Christian Democratic" Center/Conservative mergers and especially the Liberal parties, their names varied from state to state. The federal CDU was not founded until 1950, later than the other parties. The Bavarians at this point decided not to join. Because a formulaic compromise by which they effectively joined-but-not was found at this point and the solution has served Bavaria's rulers well, that solution has never after been tampered with. (The talk occasionally arose, especially in the early 80s - when Strauß tried a more "independent" CSU line and Kohl threatened to set up a Bavarian state CDU in retaliation.)

That of course leaves the question of why the Bavarians refused to join in 1950. A quick search didn't turn up anything truly enlightening, but consider: Bavaria had a tradition of not viewing itself as entirely belonging with that Prussian Kleindeutschland. After 45 these feelings revived for a time. The CSU suffered a split in 1947 with the more outspoken Bavarian particularists founding the Bayernpartei, which still exists as a joke party shell but until the 1960s was represented in the state parliament - and which polled 17% in the 1950 state elections and forced the CSU into second place behind the SPD that year. The CSU leaders had reason not to want to be (or appear) subject to Adenauer's Rhenanian leadership in 1950.
Also, the Center had suffered a rather more relevant split during the Weimar Republic, when the Bavarian wing refused the Constitutional compromise with the SPD and set up its own party the BVP, and the two parties usually didn't sit in government together (but just as today didn't compete each other for votes, the Center not running in Bavaria!)

And is there any real difference CSU and CDU in terms of policy?

Occasionally. Being more independent in your decision making, and being required to appear so from time to time to pacify your home electorate, does tend to do that.

[minionofmidas]

OK, that was a pragmatic, non-ideological explanation. In many textbooks about European politics CSU is generally described as being significantly to the right of CDU. Is that incorrrect IYO?

"Incorrect" would be pushing it, but it can certainly be overstated.

[minionofmidas]

That's not what "social" means in an American context. -_- (And it's not particularly true either, tho' you'll get the occasional populist outburst to support the view. Especially from Bavaria's current PM...)

[minionofmidas]

Yeah, this is just as true elsewhere in rural Germany though, I'd think.