🇩🇪 German state & local elections

[CumbrianLefty]

Jesus, that is hellish for the SPD.

[CumbrianLefty]

CDU secretary-general Paul Ziemiak: "Politically, the FDP has played with fire and has set Thuringia and our entire country on fire today."

Seems like the CDU has decided to throw the FDP under the bus. They're the scapegoat now.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch tbf.

[CumbrianLefty]

  So what is exactly accomplished if new elections yield roughly the same political balance?  Why not accept Kemmerichs resignation and keep trying for a new approach now instead of going for new elections?

Well, an election might do that - or equally it might not.

If the result then is similarly inconclusive, maybe that is the time to consider other things.

[CumbrianLefty]

I'd argue the most dangerous spot for a party to be polling in is 6-7%, whereas if it's getting 4-5% there's a very high chance it will get in.

To a degree tactical voting exists in all electoral systems, not just FPTP

[CumbrianLefty]

How would the FDP not making it alter the other parties?

[CumbrianLefty]

SPD looking set to lose more ground than CDU, though?

[CumbrianLefty]

I'm a member of a dead party Why can't we have something like En Marche?

If anything I'd argue the CDU is closer to that than the SPD?

Certainly not convinced that Germany "needs" a new centre-right neoliberal party tbh.

[CumbrianLefty]

I am aware of what happened on the old thread, but was it really needed to delete the whole thing?

[CumbrianLefty]

AfD tends to overestimate the AfD

Cocky bastards.

Very possibly true, though.

[CumbrianLefty]

Yes, unfortunately, Sahra Wagenknecht has some views related to the pandemic close to Bolsonaro's views. Is she an important member of the party yet?

She was elected top candidate for the NRW list in the federal elections, but with mere 61 %. Support for her within the party is dwindling (same with her husband Oskar Lafontaine).

Now there's a blast from the past......

[CumbrianLefty]

In the end this was one of those elections that surprises us with how boring it ended up being: exactly the sort of result you would expect given that the CDU are now in opposition federally, the FDP are in government with the centre-left federally but were in government with the CDU regionally (a bad place to be for a party so reliant on the votes of the politically non-aligned), and that this was the first NRW state election held after the Greens became more than a boutique party. It is, from a centre-left perspective, unfortunate and disappointing that the FDP lost just enough votes to the CDU to make a replication of the federal coalition very problematic, but such is politics sometimes. Most analysis that I've seen is either wishcasting or doomerism, rather than anything much grounded in what we actually saw.

Part of this is, as is quite often the case, due to the polls getting it a bit wrong.

[CumbrianLefty]

The Berlin Constitutional Court declared the WHOLE Berlin state election invalid and ruled that it has to be rerun ENTIRELY.

Wow, that's pretty big.

Are there any past precedents for this?

[CumbrianLefty]

The polling number for the FDP could have a very dramatic effect on their already jeopardized re-entry into the Berlin House of Representatives.
Can you conjecture why?

Because a lot of FDP voters/leaners are uneasy with the traffic light coalition. SPD and Greens are considered left of center parties and a decent junk of the FDP base feels uncomfortable with that. However, I'd argue that's more a public perception than reality. The FDP got a lot of their policies written down in the coalition agreement and actually has more influence on the government that it should have based on the election result. I'm fairly sure the Greens would have gotten more in a Jamaica coalition and not FDP, because the Greens would be the ones to leave their "traditional camp".

The FDP generally seems to be more appealing out of government rather than in. The 2009-13 second Merkel cabinet was also a horrible period for the party.

I was driving at something else: Berlin is the only state where the 5% threshold applies to the final tally of all votes cast in a state election, including all void and blank ballots, thus effectively raising the threshold for parties to enter the Berlin House of Representatives.

How often has this actually made a difference?

[CumbrianLefty]

How often has this actually made a difference?

Never. However, that rule almost applied to the result of the Alternative List, the predecessor of Bündnis Bündnis 90/Die Grünen Berlin, which received 4.94% of all votes and 4.99% of all valid votes in 1990. (Strangely, official results only cite the latter percentage, which doesn't make sense for Berlin elections imho.) But even if the AL had eked out 5 percent of the valid votes while missing the threshold based on the total vote, they would have entered the House of Representatives because the Federal Constitutional Court decreed that year that the threshold for either election - i.e. the federal election and the contemporaneous Berlin state election - shan't apply nationwide for once but only either to West Germany or East Germany or, in terms of Berlin, only either to West Berlin or East Berlin, respectively. Since the Alternative List exceeded a vote of 5% in West Berlin, while their eastern sister party, Bündnis 90, passed the threshold in East Berlin, both parties managed to enter the House of Representatives.

I also learned during my research that (the) Saarland used the very same rule for its state elections until 1994.

PS: Sorry for my non-understandable prose™!

Thank you for taking the trouble to actually look into this

[CumbrianLefty]

This is worse than expected for the SPD, no?

[CumbrianLefty]

What are the chances of a black-green coalition?

I know they spared each other little on the campaign trail, but in itself that isn't always decisive.

[CumbrianLefty]

Ah well, expect the SPD's steadly decline to continue then.

[CumbrianLefty]

A bit closer than expected maybe?

[CumbrianLefty]

I am sceptical of "grand coalitions" generally, but no this one doesn't seem so bad.

[CumbrianLefty]

Yes, minimum disruption is the right course here and shows the court acted sensibly.