German Elections & Politics

[minionofmidas]

That poll isn't giving her one. No poll since election day has given her one. There have been five; the two by Forsa have shown CDU/CSU with a lead over SPD/Left/Greens while the three not by Forsa have all shown a tie. All five polls, however, have shown AfD at 5 (first Forsa, Forschungsgruppe Wahlen) or 6 (second Forsa, both Emnid) - and the FDP at 3 or 4.

[minionofmidas]

Wiesbaden. Federal results (the CDU actually came second in Mitte, Rheingauviertel and Amöneburg and within a point of it in Kastel, and third in the West End in the state elections.) Keys... Same as in the Hesse municipal map for "leading party" except Sonnenberg is actually just 25+ not 30+ (almost 30 though, saw the need to distinguish from other 20+ results), five point steps for CDU (20+ to 45+), SPD (15+ to 30+) and turnout (55+ to 85+), 2.5 steps for FDP (2.5+ to 12.5+) and Greens (5+ to 20+), 1 point steps for AfD (3+ to 6+... and the two extreme shades used just twice and once respectively), and 2 point steps for Linke (1+ to 11+, which means that expressive northeast-southwest dividing line is indeed the 5% threshold! Linke-turnout correlation also quite remarkable.)

[minionofmidas]

A coproduction. Frankfurt by day precinct, postal results mathematically distributed to precincts - details on request.

[minionofmidas]

[minionofmidas]

With the right kind of eye, you can still just about make out that Frankfurt-Oberrad was an old Waldhufendorf before it turned workers' suburb in the second half of the 19th century.

http://goo.gl/maps/PPjL1

The following maps are in 2 point scale at the uneven points...



Yes, there's a single <5% precinct in Frankfurt.

[minionofmidas]

The green epicentres in Bornheim and Westend are obvious and expected.

Huh? What? Greens in the Westend? Last seen in the 80s, pal. (You're thinking of Bockenheim, and of the Westend when you refer to the Nordend just after. The question of what is Bornheim and what is the Nordend - and what Ostend - should not be entered on lightly or on an empty stomach. -_-)

[minionofmidas]

There are details that make sense to me here... but not really all that many. One point scale. Yeah, the AfD vote in the city was that even, between 3 and 7 almost everywhere. Also doesn't seem to correlate with numbers of postal voters at all, at least at the micro level. (These are figures I've looked at sort of accidentally, as a result of the calculations to include the postal votes. So I'm talking of correlation of party strength to number of postal voters from a precinct, compared to the other precincts grouped into the same postal vote precinct here. Expectable positive correlations of FDP and - almost everywhere - CDU, negative correlations of SPD and Left, and the Greens jump all over the place due to it mattering a lot what their relative stronghold in question is being compared with.)

Curious for your AfD map-will it also show 1960s/1970s detached housing areas as their strongholds, as around Hamburg? How about Oberursel in this respect?

The municipal map of Hesse sort of does when you zoom in on the Frankfurt area, given that for all their affluence, the Vortaunus (and I think also the Offenbach) suburbs did fill up in the 50s to 70s and suburban growth since has mostly been elsewhere. See also the city's suburban far north on this map.

[minionofmidas]

In Munich much of the AfD voting pattern seems to be random noise. I will try to explain what I mean:
Non-postal precincts had on average 557 active voters. The average of the AfD in non-postal precincts was 5.0% (including postal votes it was 4.5%). So let's assume a precincts of 557 and every voter votes AfD with a probability of 5.0%. Then the expectation would be 27.85 votes, but only ca. half of the time would the result lie in the bracket 25 - 31. And if we would consider family members and neighbors influencing each other, the bracket would be even wider.
In reality half of the non-postal precinct results lie in the bracket 4.2%-5.9%, which is a bit more than we had pure random noise distrubution, but still...

So, what remains?
* Inner-city districts, which mostly are Green strongholds, have relatively weak AfD results: Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt at 3.3% (compared to 4.5%), Schwanthalerhöhe at 3.4%, Au-Haidhausen at 3.6% etc.
* On the other hand the district with the highest AfD percentage (5.2%) is Bogenhausen, many other districts are at 5.1% or 5.0%, but the outer districts are much more heterogenous, so we would need to look on these in detail
* The are is some detached housing, but normally only dispersed among other individual housing. When it comes to the difference between the more posh individual housing quarters (parts of Bogenhausen, Harlaching, Solln, Obermenzing, Gern, Waldtrudering etc.) and the more middle-class quarters, there are some differences, but then you find so many counterexamples...
* There seems to be a tendence towards the AfD in some peripheral and semi-peripheral not-so-well-off quarters, but these are not individual housing, but instead they often look like Frankfurt's SPD strongholds.
* Northern Bogenhausen is a bit less posh than Western Bogenhausen and has higher AfD results, though Bogenhausen as a whole was also an FDP stronghold in 2009.

It's really a mess, particularly compared to other parties of the same size (FDP, Linke) or smaller parties (Pirates, Nazis), which have clearer patterns.

Yes. This sounds right to me.

[minionofmidas]

Kassel, winning margin, turnout, SPD, CDU, Greens, Left, FDP, AfD but don't ask me for the exact keys (except the first one, which is as for WI) because I'd have to reconstruct them from the results myself. I do remember turnout runs in five point steps from 50+ to 80+. The area that looks like an exclave is part of the city, but is uninhabited and excluded from the borough organization. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%B6nche

[minionofmidas]

In Frankfurt there has been in the past a general tendency for the Greens to underperform in postal votes in strong Green years, especially if they weren't strong SPD years as well, and to overperform in weak Green years that has nothing (or at least little) to do with late swings and everything to do with core Green voters being a somewhat postal-voting-affine group and more 'red-green' voters being more like 'pure' SPD voters in that respect (but more like core Green voters in many others, notably policies supported.) It's all about class, of course. Isn't everything?

[minionofmidas]

What's a local election in Hamburg? Have they decoupled city and borough elections or what? (checks) Seems to be the case.

[minionofmidas]

Full equality of gay civil unions with marriage is going to be achieved by the end of this parliament, no matter what government we get or even if black-yellow had been reelected. We're pretty far already.

Gay marriage is a nonstarter thanks to the way things have happened the way they have.

[minionofmidas]

German lawmaking doesn't work that way (except rarely, on occasion).

[minionofmidas]

FDP at five? Srsly?

[minionofmidas]

Since there is a 3 % hurdle in the EP election both FDP and AFD Will have seats there. Amy news which group AFD Will join? ECR or EFD?!

1. I expect the AFD to do way better at the EU election next year with them being one of the few options eurosceptic voters have. It wouldn't surprise me if they get a result in the double digits.

While it's impossible to predict and your outcome is well within the result of possibility... in Germany, unlike some other countries, the Euro electorate has always tended to be more 'pro-European' than the population at large, not less.

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This is both correct. (I actually searched for clues on the latter question, but I don't really expect any kind of answers until just before the election, possibly even not until right after. I doubt it's high on the party leadership's to-do list right now.)

[minionofmidas]

They're not talking about it all that much, and the media don't report it when they do, but the Left proposes to abolish the threshold for federal elections, and have introduced bills to that effect.

[minionofmidas]

Abolish altogether. And yeah, that'd mean you win a seat at about 0.1% of the nationwide vote.

[minionofmidas]

And in Hessen? Black-green coalition?

Don't have much clue about Hesse, but perhaps Lewis knows more about it.

Last thing I heard is that CDU + SPD, CDU + Greens, and even SPD, Greens + Left are still negotiating with each other.

sondieren, so sort of pre-negotiating. But the the "and even" should be placed before Black-Green; clearly the least probable outcome.

It also remains entirely possible that no government will be formed at all and we'll vote again some day. But the likelihood of that has clearly decreased.

[minionofmidas]

What!? von der Leyen to defense? Roflmao.

[minionofmidas]

They should of course have been wearing sneakers and jeans.

[minionofmidas]

They're to the right of most European mainstream-left parties

I don't think that's actually true.

Well, its hard to measure those things, but what major European mainstream-left (=main centre-left) parties do you consider to be a) to the right of the SPD b) equally right winged?

I would consider SPD to be clearly to the right of PS, PSOE and all the Scandinavian SDs and slightly to the right of Labour.

Irish Labour is to their right, but who else?

PASOK!

[minionofmidas]

I would say, from looking at the world, that the US House's two years are too short and anything longer is too long.

[minionofmidas]

I would say, from looking at the world, that the US House's two years are too short and anything longer is too long.

So, you favour the Australian or NZ way (3 years) ?

That's the least bad option available in practice, but I meant the post exactly as I wrote it - three years already is too long.

[minionofmidas]

God, no. Wowereit inherited that mess (and failed entirely to solve it, partly because it would have required cutting prestige losses long before the planning disaster was apparent to laymen, something politicians are of course notoriously wroth to do.) The actual culprits are, in ascending order, Manfred Stolpe, Eberhard Diepgen, and Helmut Kohl.

[minionofmidas]

Breaking: Threshold for the Euros is unconstitutional.