🇩🇪 German state & local elections

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

To get a bit away from the events in Thuringia for a change, the Hamburg state election will occur exactly one week from now (February 23). Provided that a snap election occurs in Thuringia it will be one of only two state elections in Germany this year. For a while, Hamburg looked like a tight race for the first place between the current governing partners SPD and Greens, but in the recents weeks the SPD of incumbent mayor Peter Tschentscher managed to gradually expand their lead.

The three most recent polls looked like this:


Trend Research Hamburg (02/10)
SPD 33%
Greens 24%
CDU 14%
Left 10%
AfD 7%
FDP 7%

Infratest dimap (02/13)
SPD 38%
Greens 23%
CDU 14%
Left 8%
AfD 6%
FDP 5%

Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (02/14)
SPD 37%
Greens 25%
CDU 13%
Left 8%
AfD 7%
FDP 4.5%

How has the Hamburg SPD managed to stay so relatively strong when the SPD is hemorrhaging across the country? I know Hamburg has been an SPD stronghold for a long, long time, but is there anything else? Is the Hamburg SPD just uniquely competent and popular? Is it their leader?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

ZDF live blog has good maps and statistics: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/wahl/buergerschaftswahl_2020/Wahl-Hamburg-Wahlbeteiligung-steigt-weiter,hhwahlliveblog100.html

scroll down a little bit and there is an interactive map of Hamburg showing unemployment rate (Arbeitslose), new housing construction (Neue Wohnung), percentage of high school students (Gymnasiasten), people with a foreign background (Migrationshintergrund), and doctors per 1000 residents (Ärtzedichte), but to switch between the maps you need to click "Auswählen"

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

First-time voters in Hamburg:


The over-70 vote:


Current seat projection, assuming FDP stays above 5%:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Strongest party 2020:


Compare to 2015:


Second strongest party 2020:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Maybe Integration has gone a bit too far in Germany?

Some cultures are incompatible and just can't integrate and adopt to Western values, it seems.

obvious /s

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Results in Germany are counted pretty quickly, right? We should more or less know the unofficial result before midnight? When can we expect an official result (a few days, a week, etc.)?

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Worst CDU performance in BaWu ever:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

That's not the SPD electoral history in RLP, that's the largest party share over the years.

Back in 1950s SPD was smaller and their worst performance in RLP is just 31.7% in 1955. They're easily going to beat that this time. And in other elections between 1947-1959 they got around 34% which is about the same they are expected to get now.

Oops, i can't read. My bad, sorry y'all

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Could you let me know where Eberdingen-Nussdorf is on this map? I was there over Christmas in 2019 and am curious

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Pretty sure this has been discussed before but i can't seem to find the post(s), but why did the FDP implode between 2009 and 2014 again? Not just in the 2013 federal election but also in many states?

My understanding is basically:
- party leader was unpopular and ineffective
- neolib agenda blocked due to Merkel's resistance after 2008 crash
- party agenda also became unpopular shortly thereafter
- extreme infighting about the Eurozone bailouts 2010-2012
- infighting also made the party unpopular as they got the image of being an unreliable, chaotic partner
- Merkel's popularity pulled many FDP voters into the CDU, thus falling under the 5% barrier

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

THANK YOU SAARLAND!

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

SPD flipped Tholey, the strongest CDU town in 2017

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Linke is behind Tierschutz in many towns 🤣

Would SPD do the ungerman thing and govern alone? Or coalition with die grünen

Almost certainly govern alone. Majorities are rare but when they happen, i am unaware of the winner forming a coalition just for the sake of it 🤔

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

SPD-CDU-AfD only parliament. Hysterical

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Love that AfD takes a big L on Victory in Europe Day 💕

The one actually interesting thing about this election is the big SSW improvement. Was it more mobilising Danish-speakers, soaking up floating leftish voters, or a little of both?

Per discussion from last year's election, SSW has attempted to broaden its appeal by going from being an explicit Danish-minority party to adopting more regionalist rhetoric ("northern Germany is being ignored by the rest of the country", etc.).

Can't say anything about this particular election in particular but I would assume this result indicates that they are continuing to reap the rewards of the same strategy.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Just some facts about the election:

• Polls close at 18.00 CET, we will get projections based upon exit polls almost immediately afterwards
• Extrapolations based upon actual votes counted will likely start coming in only after 18.30 CET
• A provisional results will likely come only later into the night
• 86 constituencies are up for grabs
• A total of 23 parties, 14 with a state list, are running for election
• results page here: https://wahlen.statistik.niedersachsen.de/Vision/map.html
• You can find the Niedersachsen Wahl-O-Mat here: https://www.wahl-o-mat.de/niedersachsen2022/app/main_app.html

I got CDU - SPD, and personally I think I would prefer a continuation of GroKo over SPD-Green given how the Greens are determined to shut down the nuclear power plant in Niedersachsen:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Also, the Cottbus mayoral election run-off is today. Will be interesting to see how that goes. The SPD candidate is favored, but the margin with AfD could be what matters.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Exit poll projection is out:





Comfortable red-black majority, narrow red-green majority

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Die Linke bleeds support for the 9th consecutive election:

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

First we take out Annie Lööf, now we come for Chrissy Lindner's head. 2022 ain't so bad after all!

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Recently the FDP has attracted many younger voters, probably because of COVID restrictions, but not only.

When during a meet-up with friends in spring one friend complained about the FDP blocking the continuation of COVID restrictions, another friend replied: "At least one reason why voting FDP was worth it." As far as I know some reasons why he had voted for the FDP (in 2021) originally were fiscal responsibility and preventing Red-Green-Red. In the past he had usually voted Greens and maybe SPD, because of environment, climate and other reasons, but he is more on the "Realo" side of course.

I think this is really part of their problem: people voted for them in 2021 due to COVID restrictions, and now it's not an issue anymore. Were these voters every truly "theirs"? Can we really say that the FDP "should" have survived the 2021 election in a world without COVID, or was this a fluke?

Let's not forget that for much of 2020, the FDP was polling at or even some times below the 5% threshold. The debacle in Thüringen in February 2020 left an extremely bad taste in many people's mouths regarding the FDP and their reliability as a party of liberalism and visibly impacted their performance in election opinion polling, with three pollsters even showing them below 4%.

They only began increasing in the polls starting in the spring of 2021 when the restrictions dragged on forever and the vaccine rollout was botched. COVID is what saved them here. If you look back in the 2021 election thread, we discussed this dynamic specifically, and questioned the durability of these FDP votes. Looks like we got our answer.

A group from whom the FDP should be careful to take advice is people who are not at all close to the FDP. It's clear that as long as the FDP stays in the Traffic Light coalition and the CDU/CSU is in opposition many of the old right-of-center swing voters won't come back and may not come back even after that, so just shifting to a traditional right-liberal position won't save it for the FDP at the moment. At the same time the FDP should ask itself what are its unique selling points towards people who are in principle ok with a Traffic Light coalition, but prefer a FDP signature. The people that recommend the FDP just supporting the Red-Green agenda are SPD or Green core voters anyway, so they are not relevant in this regard.

I am one of those SPD supporters they should be wary of, but I'll try to be objective: the FDP ran on things such as loosening COVID restrictions, modernizing the state, reducing bureaucracy, fiscal discipline, blocking tax increases, and some fluffy education stuff. But they also seemed to play the role of vapid centrist party that picked up a lot of votes from people who were attracted by the image of the party making the state "modern" and Lindner's "rise & grind" hustle-culture image.

• COVID restrictions: here the FDP had an almost-immediate win coming out of the gates. From May of this year onwards, what few COVID restrictions we still have are basically performative, with a handful of remaining restrictions such as masking in public transit and healthcare facilities. Otherwise the pandemic is basically over and the emergency laws regarding this have been greatly modified to give more power to the states, rather than the federal government. So this is a case of a promise being kept.
• Fiscal Discipline: here the FDP is in a tough position. It was reasonable to demand a return to the debt brake starting in 2022 during the 2021 campaign, when it looked like COVID was ending and the world was undergoing a major economic upswing. The election happened in September 2021, but they couldn't have foreseen that Russia would begin throttling gas deliveries in November 2021 and then invade Ukraine in February 2022, setting off the current crisis. But the debt brake and fiscal discipline was one of their key selling points, and they can't really drive it home unless they are accused of pushing Germany into an economic depression. I'm not sure how they manage to resolve this predicament.
• Modernizing the state: this one they haven't really delivered much on, but it's a promise that can still be fulfilled without undermining the coalition agreement and the other points in their platform. The problem is that all of the government's time and attention is getting sucked up by other issues and the FDP is really struggling to get its issues to the forefront. I think the SPD and Greens could make a lot of concessions to the FDP here and allow them to "own" these policy wins to keep the FDP satisfied, but again these issues are relatively minor and de-prioritized give then crisis.
• Reducing bureaucracy: here the FDP actually does have some wins they can point to, but the problem is that these wins are coated in left-wing policies so it's hard for the FDP to "own" these wins without looking like a leftist party. For example, the new unemployment benefits ("citizen's money") reduces the punitive penalties and intrusive checks from the government towards the unemployed that became so hated under Hartz IV, which is an FDP win, but also increases unemployment benefits and thus government spending, and it looks like the SPD is mostly "owning" this issue as they obviously want to drop the anchor of Hartz IV from around their necks. The same thing with the housing benefits expansion: it again streamlines and modernizes the bureaucracy, but also expands government benefits and spending. And again the SPD is mostly "owning" that issue. And again same issue with the nationwide public transit ticket: get rid of the incomprehensible maze of ticket zones, but also increase government spending. There are some more issues in the pipeline like a new transgender law, legalized cannabis, new citizenship law, and an overhaul of the immigration system that could give the FDP some more credibility on civil liberties, but those are also seen as rather niche issues in the grander scheme of things. The FDP will have to make some major moves here to really stay true to their voters. I personally would like to see the billions of paper forms disappear both in my personal and professional life, because German bureaucracy is just unbearable.
• Blocking Tax Increases: here, an absolute FDP win. They have blocked any increases in income, corporate, or consumption taxes, and most importantly blocked the SPD and Greens from getting a wealth tax through.
• Education: this seems to be the evergreen issue for liberal parties across Europe, but I don't remember any concrete promises other than 1% of VAT goes to education. The BaFÖG reform was successful with an FDP mark, but they don't really seem to be "owning" this. Other than that I don't really know of any concrete promises or ideas from the Traffic Light coalition on this topic, so I have no idea how to judge this

I think the FDP's big issue is that their promises in the 2021 campaign were more "we will stop this and that" rather than "we will deliver a positive action". While of course they promised many things, the biggest narratives around them were 1.) acting as a block on an SPD-Green government agenda, particularly on fiscal issues, and 2.) loosening COVID restrictions. From the beginning, a campaign of blocking things is something that doesn't really endear people to you. It's always very risky to rely on saying you stopped things that didn't happen from happening. And while they won on the COVID issue, the pandemic was a one-time issue, so this doesn't really have staying power.

There have also been unforced errors, like Lindner's gratismentalität comment and the Porsche thing, which just confirms the stereotype of the party being an elitist and clientelistic party. Or the debacle with the gas surcharge just made everyone look bad: the FDP originally wanted to pass costs onto consumers, which made people angry, and I suppose you could call this a kind of tax increase on the consumer? Then they were forced to reverse course and nationalize the two gas companies, which goes against the FDP's liberal ideology and also embarrassed all three parties because the coalition is chaotic and constantly changing direction during a time of crisis.

Then again, I'm just an SPDer, so maybe I'm just full of it or missing some things that the few FDP/CDU posters we have could tell us about.

Or maybe the FDP is caught between a rock and a hard place anyways and there is no way out for the moment.

I think this is more or less it.

Unlike the January Agreement in Sweden in 2019, the Traffic Light coalition agreement doesn't actually force the Social Democrats and Greens to implement tough-to-swallow centre-right policies. I myself was quite surprised when I read the coalition agreement and thought to myself, "This is literally just the SPD-Green platform, with some points taken out". Maybe that is the problem all along: the FDP just acts as a brake without really driving through its own policies outside a handful of minor points here and there. Maybe they should have played hard ball during the negotiations to get real and meaningful concessions.

They could start playing brinkmanship with the SPD-Greens on issues like energy policy (keeping open the three remaining nuclear plants seems like both good politics and good policy), demand new focus on their issues of bureaucracy, regulations, the adjustment of income tax tables, small business issues, the property tax filing extension, digitalization, the Startup Strategy that Lindner proposed, home-office regulations, etc. and demand more attention to these. It will be hard given the crisis will continue into 2023 and likely 2024, but perhaps they can convince the SPD and Greens to give them some wins.

Pulling out and maybe forcing a new election isn't really an option. If you pull out of a government coalition less than one year in because of bad poll numbers, especially in times of a major crisis, what kind of signal does that send about your reliability as a partner (even to the CDU) and as a responsible party to the country?

Finally, just looking at how German politics has evolved since 2008-2009, it feels like there just isn't much of an appetite for economic liberalism in Germany anymore, unlike the 1990s and 2000s. Who really thinks that austerity is justified now? Probably the FDP has to really drive home their plans for modernization, digitalization, and liberal policies regarding civil liberties to salvage what they can.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

The FDP should just go all the way on nuclear energy. Twist the SPD and the Greens' arm and don't just keep the current power plants open, but actually open some of the closed ones within one year. It'll cost a lot of money but so did the Energiewende, and I don't buy that it's technically impossible. We're in a continental crisis in which all existing taboos should be rethought. It's the right thing to do and it'll show right-wing voters they still have some balls.

I would like to see this too, but it feels like German society is quite viscerally anti-nuclear and this is an extremely broad and deep sentiment. And knowing the stubbornness of Germans, I am pessimistic on this changing.

I also wonder if we can really say that this is also something that won't backfire on the FDP, because keeping open the nuclear power plant in Niedersachsen was an issue in the state election and yet the Greens surged and FDP lost. The federal Greens also seem like they will never, ever accept reopening new power plants and yet people keep voting for them. And I haven't seen any polling showing major changes in how Germans view nuclear energy.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

lmfao what a failure


Wonder how the state SPD will defend this, given that the guy in charge of the elections was one of theirs.

Interestingly, the latest poll shows the SPD and Greens more or less where they were in 2021, but the CDU has now edged them out for first place (obviously, margin of error):



2021 was SPD 21%, Greens 19%, CDU 18%, Linke 14%, AfD 8%, FDP 7%.

Let's see if this 52% RRG majority holds, or if voters punish the RRG governing alliance for mismanagement when the election approaches. Maybe it's time for a change, idk.


Interestingly, I am sandwiched on two sides (north/northwest and east/northeast) by precincts that have to redo their election.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

So, now Berlin will also have a referendum this year....but not on the same day as the repeat elections. Instead the "Climate Neutral 2030" referendum will happen separately on March 26th.

Reasons for this difference include the tight deadlines to prepare both a repeat election and a referendum, the tight deadline for the Berlin House of Representatives to debate and pass the necessary legislation. Apparently both the Returning Officer and the individual districts were unanimous in their opposition to holding the referendum on the same day as the repeat election due to the practical constraints.

Truly hilarious, this city.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

INSA for Bild Magazine poll:

SPD: 21%
CDU: 21%
Grüne: 20%
Linke: 12%
AfD: 10%
FDP: 6%

RRG still a comfortable 53%. Many polls show the CDU in the lead with the SPD and Greens exchanging second and third place. Seems like it will be similar to 2021, but even more of a nail-biter. But even still, RRG is almost certainly going to happen again.