2013 Elections in Germany

[rob in cal]

   I'm interested in just what percentage of votes go to parties that don't cross the 5% threshold.  If FDP and AFD both narrowly fail that will be alot.  Also, if just one of them fails it means that of say 10% of the vote going to parties under 5%, a strong majority will be going to parties of the right and/or center.  So we could see a situation where a very narrow majority  of the vote goes to parties from the FDP rightwards, but such parties would gain only about maybe 48% of the seats, if only one of the FDP or AfD makes it into the Bundestag.
    I'm calculating that alot of the vote for sonstiges (others) is for right leaning parties, and am counting the Pirates as on the left.

[rob in cal]

So, ideologically the parties from the FDP and further to the right (all the way to the NDP) won about 52% of the vote, and get slightly under 50% of the seats, all in one party of course.  Not a huge distortion by any means, but clearly a majority of voters did not vote for left leaning parties and they have a tiny majority of the seats.

[rob in cal]

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?  

[rob in cal]

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.

[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?