2013 Elections in Germany

[minionofmidas]

Both are back to nature parties which I can argue has roots in the NASDAP regime.

The right wing of that movement (in which, in turn, the ÖDPish wing of the early Greens does have some roots. Oh yes.) got along quite fine with Nazism, and actually infiltrated - purposefully and successfully! - an obscure bureaucratic department relevant to their interests and hiring a lot after 1933. (Convinced ecologists planned some of the earliest motorway service stations in Germany and it showed. )

But nazism is not its root - they were happy with the Nazis until 1941 because they were bourgeois Germans and all bourgeois Germans were happy with the Nazis until 1941, is more like it.

But has the Animal Welfare party staked out other positions that would qualify it as right leaning? I know the Ecological Democrats have, but not sure about the Animal Welfarites.

The Animal Welfare party, like the Families Party and the Womens' List, does not need publicized stances, or any kind of election campaign, to poll relative well for a really minor party because it's name is so feelgood and inoffensive that it attracts enough eeny-meeny-moe voters.

I would not include these parties' voters in any left-right matrix.

[Middle-aged Europe]

And as expected, we also got our first black Bundestag member ever, even though he failed to win the direct seat in Halle: Karamba Diaby.

Nor is he the only one.



Charles M Huber, grandnephew of Léopold Sédar Senghor, tv actor, freshly baked CDU MdB - he narrowly lost his direct seat too (in Darmstadt) but was the fourth of four people to get in over the state list.

Wow, I was even't aware that Charles M. Huber was running for office.

[minionofmidas]

When did religious affiliation cease to play a role in party loyalties (west of the former Wall that is)? Was it the 1968 movement, or was it a longer term postwar trend?

Did it ever?

The CDU was, of course, founded as a fusion of Catholic/Center Party and Protestant/Conservative and National Liberal traditions, but (exactly like CDA, except of course completely different) failed to fully realize that aim because Protestants did not like to be hostilely taken over by Catholics, and voted (initially) FDP and later sometimes SPD. And the CDU is still doing clearly better in Catholic than Protestant areas. But it has never been a "Catholic" Party a la the old Center Party.
WWII also of course had the effect of increasing the religious minority's share of the population everywhere.

[Middle-aged Europe]

   If voters could have a second choice to be used if their party didn't cross the threshold, how would Afd, Pirate and FDP voters have responded?  

Voter transfer analysis has shown that the AfD gained mostly from the FDP, closely followed by the Left Party.

Which sort of makes sense considerung that both the AfD and the Left Party can be regarded as eurosceptic protest parties.

[minionofmidas]

   If voters could have a second choice to be used if their party didn't cross the threshold, how would Afd, Pirate and FDP voters have responded?  

Voter transfer analysis has shown that the AfD gained mostly from the FDP, closely followed by the Left Party.

Which sort of makes sense considerung that both the AfD and the Left Party can be regarded as eurosceptic protest parties.

Although that does not, of course, mean that's who they'd have voted for this year.

[Franknburger]

When did religious affiliation cease to play a role in party loyalties (west of the former Wall that is)? Was it the 1968 movement, or was it a longer term postwar trend?

As not everybody may have been reading this thread completely, let me repost two maps as an answer. First, the confessional map according to 2011 census results (Catholic is orange, Protestant is violet, blue indicates "no confession").



Plus the 2013 SPD PV (Colouring in 7.5%-steps, from <15 to >37.5).


In case you wonder about the protestant regions in the south-west, check out Grüne and FDP maps a few pages above.

In addition, note that Angela Merkel is a Protestant from the North-East. The religious divide was very obvious as recently as 2002 (Schroder-Stoiber).

[Middle-aged Europe]

   If voters could have a second choice to be used if their party didn't cross the threshold, how would Afd, Pirate and FDP voters have responded?  

Voter transfer analysis has shown that the AfD gained mostly from the FDP, closely followed by the Left Party.

Which sort of makes sense considerung that both the AfD and the Left Party can be regarded as eurosceptic protest parties.

Although that does not, of course, mean that's who they'd have voted for this year.

If I'd have to make an educated guess, they would have either voted for the Left again or the SPD or become non-voters.

[Bacon King]

Invalid Vote Percentage (Second Vote)

[minionofmidas]

Huh... a lot of Hessians turning out for Schäfer-Gümbel / Bouffier but refusing to vote for Steinbrück / Merkel?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Did the one that always comes first first for the usual reasons (to get a better feel for things, to fix any remaining minor errors in the base map, etc). The key is my standard one for leading party stuff, which I'm sure I'll remember to repost at some point (but it runs 0, 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 15, 25, 33, 45).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Think I'll do an FDP collapse map before anything else. The world needs laughter.

[Sozialliberal]

Concerning the ideological disproportionality of the results, of course the FDP and the NDP would never work together, that I realize.  I was including them together as part of the non-leftist electoral majority that won something like 52.5 to 53% of the vote.  Is is plausible to include the Ecological Democratic Party on the right?  Seems like the are to the right on some issues.
    By my count I get about 45.3 % of the vote to leftist parties (SPD, Linke, Greens, Pirates, Animal Welfare, Marxist Leninists, Violets), and the aforementioned roughly 52.5 to 53% to non-leftist groups, assuming we can count Ecological Democrats, Bavarian Party, Alliance for Germany together with the bigger parties.  The 5% threshold law has worked its random and arbitrary electoral magic yet again.
    If voters could have a second choice to be used if their party didn't cross the threshold, how would Afd, Pirate and FDP voters have responded?  

I made the argument before that Animal Welfare might be considered Right just like Ecological Democratic Party should be considered Right.  Both are back to nature parties which I can argue has roots in the NASDAP regime.

I've read that libertarians don't like environmentalism, but that's just ridiculous. There were indeed nazis who were also environmentalists/animal welfarists, but the ideas of evironmentalism and animal welfare are much older than the nazis. Have you ever heard of the "Naturfreunde" (Naturefriends)? They are one of the oldest environmental organisations and they're social democratic. The organisation "Naturfreunde" was founded in 1895, long before the NSDAP was founded. The "Naturfreunde" organisation was banned in Germany after the NSDAP came to power. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras had an even more radical stance on animal ethics than today's animal welfarists. He argued for a vegetarian lifestyle for ethical reasons more than two thousand years ago.

[Franknburger]

As to the "right block - left block" discussion, here an overview on some of the CDU's positions during the campaign:

Foreign policy: No German participation in attacking Syria, integrate Russia in diplomatic processes and work through the UN.

Health Care: Maintain current system (which has in various aspects served as model for ObamaCare), oppose FDP desire to partly re-privatise health insurance.

Budget: Use part of current strong tax revenue for debt reduction. Oppose FDP plans to reduce the top tax rate. Step up infrastructure & education funding instead, and increase parental allowance (fact-checking found the program to be financially unfeasible and increasing the budget deficit).

Legal minimum wage: Extend coverage to further sectors where unionisation is low (FDP opposes any legal minimum wage, SPD/ Grüne/ Linke call for introduction of an universal minimum wage).

Housing rents: Extend the curtailing of rent increases, which already exists for on-going rent contracts, towards new contracts (Originally proposed by SPD, taken over by CDU, opposed by FDP).

Energy: Phase out nuclear energy, promote renewables. A lot of mess about details. A major conflict line runs between the FDP, who want to reduce energy costs for industry, and most other parties (including the CDU) that want to maintain incentives for renewables, especially wind power. [Angela Merkel is well aware that equipment for wind power generation has become the largest industrial activity in her home state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern].

That's a pretty social-democratic programme, and a main reason why (a) Merkel has been re-elected and (b) polls show the majority of voters preferring a Grand Coalition instead of black-yellow.

[ZuWo]

Karl Lauterbach, SPD MP and member of Steinbrück's "competence team", has floated the idea of a minority government led by Merkel. Is it conceivable that his party actually has the audacity to refuse to enter a coalition with Merkel and stay in the opposition?

[Famous Mortimer]

I thought AfD were wonkish libertarians. I wouldn't expect wonkish libertarians to do well in a former Communist country.

Are there actually far-right elements hiding in the party? Or are they just happen to let far-right voters project onto them?

[Middle-aged Europe]

I thought AfD were wonkish libertarians. I wouldn't expect wonkish libertarians to do well in a former Communist country.

Are there actually far-right elements hiding in the party? Or are they just happen to let far-right voters project onto them?

The AfD is against the Euro and they don't really have much more of a platform than that. Well, according to the campaign ad I saw on TV they also want to restrict immigration, because the immigrants are exploiting our welfare system or something.

So their ideology could be summed up as "German money belongs to Germans".

[palandio]

The main AfD platform in the election was against the Euro and I think many not-so-ideological 2009 Left protest voters voted AfD for that reason.

But the AfD has also an ideology other than that. That reaches from the CDU business wing to paleo-libertarians, from New Right ideologues to disappointed liberals and mainstream conservatives. It is really a strange fit for left-wing voters, but I think many 2009 Left voters did not identify as left-wing (I think there were even surveys about that).

[njwes]

Sächsische Schweiz is such a sh**thole..

CDU 46.0%
Left 17.1%
SPD 10.9%
AfD 7.9%
NPD 5.1%
Greens 3.6%
Free Voters 3.2%
FDP 3.2%

With that attitude surely the Left will be back in power in no time!  

[rob in cal]

Point taken about the CDU moving towards the SPD in alot of policies.  One question I have is had the SPD been in government the last four years, say in a red-green coalition, what would they have done differently than the outgoing coalition?

[Hash]

Berlin results by precinct

http://berlinwahlkarte2013.morgenpost.de/#filter=6

[Middle-aged Europe]

Point taken about the CDU moving towards the SPD in alot of policies.  One question I have is had the SPD been in government the last four years, say in a red-green coalition, what would they have done differently than the outgoing coalition?

There would be a universal minimum wage of 8.50 EUR an hour, efforts would have been made to switch healthcare to a single-payer system instead of the "mixed" system we have now and the top income tax rate would have been increased.

Also, there would be no Betreuungsgeld (child care subsidy) and more money would have been put into renewable energies.

That's basically it, I think.

[Middle-aged Europe]

News from the Greens:

SPIEGEL Online reports that Cem Özdemir plans to stay on as party chairman. His co-chairwoman Claudia Roth will step down and plans to become one of the deputy speakers of the Bundestag. No information on who will succeed Roth as chairwoman.

Also no information on the fate of former lead candidates Jürgen Trittin and Katrin Göring-Eckardt, but general consensus is that they won't play much of a role in the party any longer. Interestingly, Göring-Eckardt is currently deputy speaker of the Bundestag for the Greens so she's gonna lose that job, I guess.

[Famous Mortimer]

Let me make sure I'm understanding you guys right when you talk about how the CDU has changed.

Are you saying:

The CDU used to be a socially conservative party that embraced the mixed economy.

Under Merkel it's a socially liberal party that wants to implement mild liberal reforms to the economy?

[Franknburger]

Point taken about the CDU moving towards the SPD in alot of policies.  One question I have is had the SPD been in government the last four years, say in a red-green coalition, what would they have done differently than the outgoing coalition?

1.Full equality of gay partnerships earlier, and without the Constitutional Court having to impose it on the government.

2. No "double U turn" on nuclear energy, which would have provided more reliability to potential investors. [The SPD might, however, have tried to favour coal over renewables, if the Greens had allowed them to do so - at least temporarily, until IG Metall (labour union for metalworking & electronics) had told the SPD that the prospective jobs are in wind power generation equipment,  not in coalmining]. Would also have kept the number of energy-intensive industries that are relieved from the renewable energy levy small, and not extended it so much beyond scope that even banks and golf courts can claim to be "energy-intensive industries". Consequently, ordinary electricity consumers, including small businesses, would have to pay some 4 billion Euros annually less for electricity than is the case today (thanks, FDP!).

3. Introduced universal legal minimum wage (probably lower than the 8.50 Euros/hour the SPD is now having in the programme). This would, among others, have ended the current abuse of the "mini-job privilege" (monthly salaries below 456 Euros are exempt from pension fund and unemployment insurance contributions, and only subject to 2% lump-sum income taxation), whereby a full-time job is split into two half-time jobs at 6,50 Euro/hour. Such abuse is widespread  in retail and gastronomy, and leads to many women, especially single mothers, being permanently excluded from social security, and very likely to suffer poverty during their old age. [A recent survey indicated some two-thirds of employers favouring the introduction of legal minimum wages in order to create a level playing field - most employers actually care for their employees].

4. Care: Remaining privileges of privately vs. publicly health-insured would have been reduced. Pharmaceutical distribution, a major cost driver and waste of resources inside the health system, would have been liberalised (the FDP is protecting small-scale pharmacists, one of their core voting groups). Overdue reform of old-age care, and the related public insurance scheme, would have been tackled (the FDP shied away from it in order to not be responsible for another increase in social security contributions). Instead of introducing allowances for parents taking care of their pre-school age children at home, public day care stations would have been strengthened -> better opportunities for combining parenthood and career, facilitating the apprehension of German by immigrants' children, thereby ultimately reducing their school drop-out rate, which is very high in Germany compared to other European countries, e.g. France.

5. Transport: Less channelling of scarce infrastructure funding into Bavaria as under the current CSU-Minister of Transport. This would in principle have allowed to plan and conduct major infrastructure projects (e.g. Fehmarnbelt Link) reasonably and in a way that is acceptable to locals. Could also have avoided the recent closure of the Kiel Channel, the World's most frequented waterway, for lack of lock maintenance. The SPD might, however, have continued "business as usual" by replacing Bavarian prestige projects with other ones elsewhere - that's where the Greens would have had to come into play. As concerns restructuring and privatisation of Deutsche Bahn, the SPD would have been as reluctant as the CDU/CSU. Again, work ahead for the Greens to separate the rail network from train operation, with the ultimate purpose of increasing competition and getting more goods and people transported by rail instead of road.

6. Attempted to rewind the latest pension reforms, especially the gradual increase of the pension age to 67 years until 2030.  Would probably initially not have been accepted by the Greens, as demographic change in Germany (ageing population, low birth rate, longer education times) makes these reforms unavoidable. However, the Greens might have compromised here, in order to get their way with respect to energy and transport policy.

7. Taxes: Some kind of income tax reform that would have reduced the tax burden for low and middle incomes, and increased the personal top income tax rate (corporate tax would probably have been left unaffected). Ideally, the long overdue VAT reform would have been tackled (at least introduced) - especially doing away with the distinction between processed food (7% VAT) and freshly-prepared one (19% VAT), which is helping manufacturers of deep-frozen pizza, but killing jobs in restaurants.

8. Army draft Abolishment of the army draft by the CDU/FDP was a major surprise. In opposition, the CDU would most likely not have accepted it. A red-green government would probably have gone for a reform that maintains the draft, but strongly reduces the weight of armed service vis-à-vis civil service (old age care, disaster relief, etc.). In view of demographic trends, a civil service draft is probably where we will have to end up anyway, but how much change into that direction would have been possible against (Bundesrat-backed) CDU/ CSU opposition is difficult to estimate..

I sureky missed something. Anyway, here's what wouldn't have been much different:
- Civil rights: SPD is as law-and-order focused as the CDU, but the Greens would have intervened on behalf of civil liberties just as the FDP did.
- European policies:  Not much change (wrote about it a few pages above). Anyway, except for AfD and the Linke (no German soldiers abroad), major parties don't differ much on foreign policy, and there is a tradition of searching for cross-partisan consensus.

[retromike22]

Forgive me if this answer has already been explained, but how come there won't be a SPD/Green/The Left coalition? I know that the SPD has ruled it out, but why?