🇩🇪 German state & local elections

[Filuwaúrdjan]

All very amusing, but I will have to make a minor modification to my map it seems!

I find statewide to be a confusing term in this thread title. Maybe change it to regional? I feel state is a poor translation of Bundesland.

'State and Local' ['' ''... "Government'] or 'State and Municipal' would be better, probably?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It is traditionally the subject of much mockery, yes.

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[Filuwaúrdjan]

I mean the Greens holding down one wing of the target audience for the centre left and the SPD the other seems perfectly workable as a long-term strategy.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As a wise man once said: aaaayyyy lmao.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If anything here comes close to the Saarland situation right now, it would be the 1979 Austrian general elections, with polls not forecasting an overall majority for SPÖ.

Tender??!?!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Would be a very peculiar set of elections if first a popular SPD candidate wins a majority in Saarland, then a popular CDU incumbent wins a majority in S-S-H, then the two parties effectively tie in NR-W.

Pretty normal for German state elections, really.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The composition of the Bundesrat is rather important given that the Greens are part of the governing federal coalition and NRW is the largest state.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If I'm not mistaken, the composition of the coalition in a state government has an impact on how that state's Bundesrat members can vote. So hypothetically a CDU majority government in NRW would send Bundesrat members who would have the power to vote down legislation, but if NRW end up with a CDU led "grand coalition" or a CDU led black-Green coalition, the NRW members in the Bundesrat are "neutered" and cannot vote down bills.

It's all very complicated (especially as it isn't uncommon for votes to be cast as a block vote in the manner of the British Labour Movement: one delegate casting all votes allocated to the state), but, yes, when the votes of a state delegation are split, it counts as an abstention. But in general you would certainly prefer the government you're part of federally to have as many positive votes as possible. It's also the case that NRW is not Hesse, where Green-SPD relations are pretty poor for reasons largely related to municipal politics in Frankfurt.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So the polls broadly speaking in the right area, except that there was more FDP > CDU than projected. Which I suppose makes sense.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

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.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

At least the US doesn't have to repeat entire state elections.

Well, strictly speaking, there isn't any absolute need to in this case and in most countries it wouldn't be happening. This is more a comment on the peculiarities of the German legal system than anything else, even if there were certainly problems with the count.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Stop the steal!

Anyway, I find it interesting that despite both getting the same vote total, the Greens appear to have lost 4 direct mandates and held 20 from 2021, whereas the SPD lost 21 and only held 4.

About what you'd expect really: the SPDs vote is very evenly distributed across the city.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Not exactly evenly distributed.

SPD second votes:

There are always patterns - and this is the usual one, which is slightly different to what the usual one was a decade ago - but the map absolutely shows a fairly evenly distributed pattern of support if you look at the keys with most wards showing results not more than a few points different to the citywide average. Now, once you drill down to polling district results then you do see sharper patterns as a rule, and I doubt it will have been different this time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

They're Plattenbau* estates, though by no means the only ones in the city (to risk understatement). Marzahn was about the last such district to be built and my memory is that the full plan for the district was never actually finished. If anything distinguishes the estates in Marzahn, and also in the North of Hellersdorf, it's their relative isolation. But in Berlin exactly who leads where only ever tells you a fairly small part of the story, the city's politics being so fragmented and kaleidoscopic. Always important to avoid FPTP brain.

_{*Term for DDR-era system-built high-rise housing. A literal translation is 'panel building'.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I just realized that the Berlin election wasn't actually for a full five year term. The next election is still scheduled for 2026 as before. So technically it was indeed just a "repeat election" and not a snap election. The court in its ruling explicitly stated this.

About the only detail of this absurd situation that isn't ludicrous, really.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An extremely farcical conclusion makes sense given that the entire 're-run' election was extremely farcical.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's pure shithousery, but (critically) incompetent shithousery, which, again, is appropriate given the general farce.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, the legislative framework on the subject is the complete opposite to Britain, where the same rules apply to political parties as to private members clubs and the like: a party can write its own rules and apply its own practices and can blackball, suspend and expel people with impunity.