2013 Elections in Germany

[Yeahsayyeah]

Here are some results for the Göttingen region

(http: / /) wahlen.kds.de/2013ltw/index.html , I cannot include links.

SPD won the constituencies of Göttingen and Göttingen/Münden, Northeim, Einbeck, Osterode and Holzminden (where Minister of the Interior, Schürnemann (CDU), lost).
CDU won Duderstadt.

Which makes a FTPT net gain of 1 for the SPD in this region (Holzminden).

[Yeahsayyeah]

According to the german wikipedia the SPD in Delmenhorst had some kind of corruption scandal, where the former SPD Landtag member Swantje Hartmann was involved.

[Yeahsayyeah]

@Watermelon: Extra seats are allocated, if one party wins more FPTP districts than it would get seats in the Landtag according to proportional representation for the full 135 seats, so called Überhangmandate. As Niedersachsen has a share of 87/135 "direct seats" there are many Überhangmandate possible. Those are compensated but a mixture of rounding errors and D'Hondt seat allocation can lead to a fully 50/50 in the Landtag.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Actually, no one knows, as this never happened anywhere, before. But as there is some discussion as black-wellow did want to tailor the federal election law in their favour there is some uproar possible.

[Yeahsayyeah]

And - what really matters most - not a few months ahead of the Bundestag election.

[Yeahsayyeah]

The mayoral election of Leipzig, Germany's 11th largest town with nowadays a tendency of growth for years, will be held the 27th of January, which is actually tomorrow. A possible 2nd round - if no candidate reaches an outright majority would be held on 17th of February.

In the second round all candidates could compete again (as in Baden-Württemberg) - most people don't know that and think it's a runoff of the first two. Who gets the most votes, wins, even if it ist not a majority of 50 percent.

Mayors in Saxony are elected for seven-year-terms, which is an awful long period IMO. So the last election was in 2006, when former Mayor Wolfgang Tiefensee (SPD), who was reelected with 2005 in a landslide, went to Berlin to become Federal Minister/ Secretary of Transportation.

Burkhard Jung, former head of the local social and youth authority (I don't know how to translate "Dezernent für Jugend und Soziales" to English properly), won in the second round with 41.6 percent. Turnout was at 31.9 percent.

All mayors since 1990 have been members of the SPD. They allways polled between 40 and 50 percent in the first round - except for Tiefensee 2005 who 67 percent.
There are six candidates

Burkhard Jung (SPD, Incumbent)
Horst Wawrzinsky (CDU, until recently police president of Leipzig)
Barbara Höll (Linke, Member of the Bundestag, also a candidate in the election of 2005)
Felix Ekhardt (Grüne, scientist - environment and sustainability stuff)
René Hobusch (FDP, lawyer)
Dirk Feitertag (supported by the Pirates, lawyer with some social activism)

Biggest campaign seems how to deal with the high demand for day care centers and schools (as many young people migrate to Leipzig and found there families here there has been a continuing Baby boom for years after in the 90s many day care centers and schools were closed down.

There were also some scandals relating the city beaurocracy - e. g. they have been illegally selling houses with unknown owners too cheap which is near dispossession for years - well it's hard to put in only one sentence.
The CEO the local waterworks illegaly burned several hundred millions of Euros in high risk financial products. But Jung tried (and until know succeeded) not to get connected with this. Also there was a large media camapign in the only local newspaper that the local authorities were too mild agains drug abusers in Leipzig an that there was to much crime related to this.


Jung ist trying his first term as a full success, saying that the jobless rate is split by half and this would be his accomplishment - and many investors (logistics, automotive industry, biotechnologies) and tourists are coming to Leipzig. Well, we all know that stuff when there is no real political platform to run on.

When the CDU nominated Horst all feared a hard law and order camaign - related to the drugs and securitiy thing. There were some strange police actions in the last months like big raids in public parks (so called "Komplexkontrollen") and an police assault at a kindergarden in Connewitz claiming to go after drug criminals - but actially as a campaigner there were no such undertones. So actually he wants to do all what Jung does, but better.

Barbara Höll mainly is a federal politician and not that much of a local figure as though she ist from Leipzig. Her platform has more to do with federal than will local policies. She got around 15 per cent in 2005 and she will propably will get there again.

Felix Ekardt is an interesting figure as a person but mainly unknown. The Greens
made some self-ironic campaign posters and flyers that actually seemed to irritate some people. Platform is typically Green: transparency, environmental stuff, more money for children (new day care centers and schools etc.)).

Hobusch is at typicial FDP guy.

Feiertag ist a lawyer for social law who has a social justice, building of day care centers, transparency and ticket-free transportation platform.


Voting ethusiasm seems to be very low - which is a result of the so called "Leipziger Modell" to let participate the big parties proportionally in the local government and having now coalitions and making the decision making and responsibilities intransparent - but also of the candidates all percieved as weak contenders.

So Jung, though many people don't like him as he stand for nothing, will probably win. One local newspaper poll from 2nd of January - so actually shortly after Christmas and befor the main campaign - had him at 55% with Horst at 21, Höll at 12, Ekardt and Feiertag at 4 and Hobusch at zero.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Polls in Leipzig have closed some minutes ago. Up-to-date results can be found at the world wide web: (I'm not allowed to post links).

leipzig.de/de/buerger/politik/wahlen/obm/2013/wahlergebnis-24701.aspx

Turnout is higher then in 2006 (around 41 per cent).

[Yeahsayyeah]

Actually the 2nd round is in three weeks (seems to have to do with the February vacations). This could get quite interesting if there was some "All but Horst and Jung"-Movement at the left. Greens, Linke and semi-pirate Feiertag together got 32 per cent.

Greens and Linke both have party meetings on Tuesday how to deal with this.

And we now know that the Leipziger Volkszeitung did a junk poll.

[Yeahsayyeah]

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FDP guy Hobusch claimed a "quite good" result and at the same time told, SPD result was a "total desaster" (Jung gut more than twenty times the votes of Hobusch).

[Yeahsayyeah]

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Mabe some policy-driven projects like "a stronger effort at building day care centers and schools" with an accurate plan with numbers or doing something at the culture budget or having more transparency or whatever. But this all would be officialy unofficial as people don't like such deals. Höll (Linke) said today that she wants to participate in the second term. Feiertag ist too much anti-establishment to deal with Jung. I really don't know what the Greens will do (missed their election party because of a cold).

[Yeahsayyeah]

According to wahlrecht.de the survey was made from 9th to 15th August, which means weaks 4 and 5 of the six week summer vacancies in Thuringia and Saxony. And it is in the so called "Sommerloch" period, where nothing political happens. I haven't even seen much of election posters recently.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Frankfurter Rundschau - Wahlhelfer

I did not intend to have the CDU at zero. It just happened.

Greens: 76%
Linke: 59%
SPD: 52%
FDP: 17%
CDU/CSU: 0%

By the way, early voting in Leipzig (technically mail voting, but you can also cast your vote directly in the town hall) did start yesterday and 185 people already voted.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Whats the big deal about it ?

US politicians for example wear pins with the US flag all the time.

It looks silly.

And it actually looks like the flag of Belgium. ;-)

[Yeahsayyeah]

Everybody knows that Gottlieb is a CSU hack, but this would not have been that much of a problem, if his counterpart Jörg Schönenborn from WDR acted like a reputable political journalist and not like a total coward without any clue by making basic mistakes and losing all authority throughout the programme.

Interesting that Brüderle was not able to capitalize on the partisanship. I knew he was a weak debater, but that weak? All that came out of his mouth was mumbling and platitudes, not even a message why to vote FDP (or should we consider the "the left parties will lay our country in ruins" to be an argument?)

[Yeahsayyeah]

I think Syria might be some hidden issue in the last weeks damaging the Greens. "True pacifists" defecting to the Left Party because they don't trust the Greens on war-and-peace-issues anymore and more conservative bourgeois types seeing them still "unreliable" in foreign politics (The party was almost disrupted over Kosovo in 1998/99).

The Green campaign never got traction this time. Maybe they overestimated the possible energization of their participative elements (members choosing the top candidates and so called "key projects" as parts of their electoral platform). The second actually seemed to have no impact at all. I am not clear weither the first helped (replacing Claudia Roth by Karin Göring-Eckart who was very pro Agenda 2010 back then and does not fit the main campaign theme of social justice very well.

The climate is also quite hostile to environmental policies this time. Nuclear energy has ceased to be a mobilizing issue with Merkel's CDU now backing a nuclear power phase out after their 180 degree turn caused by Fukushima) and the and the issue of nuclear power repository is down due to a new started moderation process.
On the other hands the Greens are perceived as responsible for high electric energy costs (of course, there are side effects of the Renewable Energy Act but they are only part of the story). And the recommendation of a veggie day did not help either, but I think the people maybe scared by this don't vote Green, anyway. (This is imho also true for the "The Greens are a bunch of child molesters!" crowd).

Because of the political climate I think switching to a "environmental policies first" platform would not have helped. The "rising taxes" meme did'nt help either (although they actually want to decrease taxes for most of the people). Honesty isn't rewarded by voters, as you can see here. *g*

The Greens had a desideration for rebranding their social policies (european meaning). Most of the party still wants to be left wing and the perception of being the party for "latte machiato mothers" only waiting for the right time to flip to the CDU did severely hurt their self-conception, even more after the financial crash of 2008/09. Emphasizing social policies (universal health care, minimum wage, tax the rich) fit the political climate very well then and it was a long term strategy. It did not work out this election due to a poor campaign (wrong female top candidate, dull spots and posters, not that convincing answers to many campaign issues), an unfavourable political climate (The CDU/FDP administration was succesfull in painting the image that "Germany is well of due to superhero Merkel and the European crisis does not need to bother us at all for she has the right strategy to lead us through it". Well, it's their own fault that the Green's didn't even try to find neither an accurate answer to that nor to emphasize a different strategy to deal with the European economical crisis. One commentary at Spiegel Online today states this would have been a possible way to give them a unique selling point as the justice party, though I am not sure this would have worked out in good election results, either.
And, last but not least,  the lack of a real option to get in power after the election does not help them at all. (Of course, this will be a problem as long as red-green rejects the Left Party).

[Yeahsayyeah]

@Old Europe: My impression ist that members and voters of the party (not so much rank and file) is still quite anti-militaristic to pacifist. I don't know if Syria is the issue here (so I called it "hidden issue") but I tried to find something which would explain the late Linke surge and the Green decrease at the same time. Of course this doesn't need to be a direct voter stream, but if so, what else could explain such a stream at this point of the campaign?

As the Greens seem to have a very reliant core voter base which votes by conviction it could be that the average Green voter just decided earlier and now the former undecided break heavyly against them.

On the other heand infratest had some polls in the last weeks were state and federal elections were polled. Greens were always higher in the state polls (up to 4 percent). So this must be due to federal issues or the campaign.

[Yeahsayyeah]

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This first distribution among the states is just a kind of fake because in the last step every party
is awarded a number of seats proportional to its vote share on the federal level. Seats will be added until every party matches at least the number of seats of the first step distribution by state, but each party's number of seat will still be proportional to its vote share. (This is actually done in the old method of distribution by party first and then by state). There is no real need for the first step as seats could be easily awarded until overhang is fully compensated on the state and federal level, which makes it so funny.

[Yeahsayyeah]

Such deals are not very common in Germany, at least they have not happened since 1957, and could likely backfire for perceived as an attempt to rig the election. It is common sense that every party has to stand for its own. It is one thing that some voters decide to vote for another party for tactical reason. Trying to force one's voters to vote for this other party would not make them very happy, particularly if the other party is the very unpopular part of the administration.

The other thing is, that the FDP is not that beloved by the CDU/CSU as well an there are even elements in the party that think a grand coalition would work much better.

[Yeahsayyeah]

As almost all of the Green loss was in Upper Bavaria ist might also be a factor that Sepp Daxenberger is not around anymore.

What is the reason of the Freie Wähler surge in Lower Bavaria?

[Yeahsayyeah]

Wow, that SPD poster from 1949 claiming a "free Germany" in the borders of 1914 really hurts the eye. Underlines the impression of Schumacher's party as wannabe nationalists more national than all others. Even the CDU had the borders of 1937 in their famous "It's ought to be the whole Germany" ("Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein").

[Yeahsayyeah]

Now the real mud throwing begins. The CDU is starting one last desperate attempt to capitalize on the "green pedophelia" thing, claiming Trittin's personal responsibility for a Green election platform for the Göttingen muncipal elections of 1981 that contained a passus advocating to punish only unconsensusal, violent sexual acts, which also implicits that 'consensual acts between adults and children' should be legal.

In my opinion, the funny thing is, that noone cared about the Green blurred positions towards the 1970s/1980s pedophelia groups and the appeal these positions had in parts of the homosexual movement, when that actually occured.

[Yeahsayyeah]

It seems as if they wanted to reunite Dalmatia with Italy, though. Late reward for the staunch ally? ;-)

[Yeahsayyeah]

They were 5th last time, so that would actually be an improvement of position. ;-)
FGW is often slighty underpolling the Greens. And as other pollsters don't publish in the last week and FGW does not give their "political mood" numbers and only made a projection we don't know, if this finals slip is only in their numbers or even only in their assumption how the numbers should look like sunday, though it is possible.

My guess is something like
CDU/CSU 38%
SPD 26,5%
Greens 9,5%
Linke 8,5%
FDP 6,5%
AfD 4.5%
Pirates 2%
Others 4,5% (this is, what should sum up to 100)

My intuition is, that Greens will gain a little bit in the east, though, but lose ground in their strongholds to SPD and partially CDU for Merkel's popularitiy and bourgeois feelings of their electorate.

The reason for the Green gains in the east are, that there are now Greens in all state parliaments, so they are now have faces and not only are seen as an abstract possibility never heard of and demographic reasons (the younger generation votes much more like the younger generation in the west and for the last years has been heading for the bigger cities like Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Erfurt or Rostock etc., instead of leaving to the west).

The under 18 mock election (did we cover the actual results?) gives an impression of that (although to take with a grain of salt).

[Yeahsayyeah]

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The constituencies are drawn by the Bundestag (= Bundestag majority/administration). There is an independent boundary commission, but their proposals often get ignored in a process. So gerrymandering is of course possible, but neither easily achieved in the Bundestag elections, because the voting patterns don't vary that much (are not that higly polarized) within the regions. And there are not much benefits achieveable, even less so by now as the overhang seats are now fully compensated.

German traditions in distribution of constituencies are not to divide municpalities and administrative districts (Landkreise), which is supposed by the electoral law, too, and to keep the constituencies as they are as long as possible (on the benefit of the imcumbents). The deviation allowed for each is +-25 percent to achieve both goals mainly. This could be used for gerrymandering though.

There also was a tradition of doing no redistribution, even with big population shifts, at all (e.g. from 1990 to 2002), but that was overthrown by the constitutional court at one time, which stated that the distribution to the federal states must equal their population.

The most visible possible gerrymander is poosibly the redistribution for 2002 (left untouched until today) in Berlin, when the inner parts of East and West Berlin were merged in several constituencies. This lead (and one could argue that was the main cause to do it) to the PDS losing two direct seats (3 are needed to get proportional seats if the party is under the five percent threshold.)

At the elections in the states gerrymandering is much more likely for the constituencies being smaller and so local strongholds in towns, villages and city districts matter much more. Not all state electoral laws have full compensation of overhang seats. For instance, in Saxony (and that could matter next year) there are only as much compensation seats as overhang seats are achieved (with CDU at around 40 percent statewide but gaining almost all FPTP seats this rule givs them a slight advantage). So they tried to crack the Left Party stronghold of Grünau (a huge 1980s "prefabricated building" area which has quite uniform demographical and voting patterns and a distinct identity), and merge the remnants with CDU leaning suburbia, some of it divided by several miles of alluvial wood with only one very small street commuting the two. They did similar moves in other parts of the state. After much local protest they left Grünau intact, but kept the attachment of some nearer suburbia.

[Yeahsayyeah]

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The used scale does exaggerate the Linke losses in non-big-city-Saxony a little bit, because statewide it has exactly 20 percent now.  Saxony also was AfD's strongest state with 6.8 per cent, so much of the protest vote probably just shifted.

The economic development of Dresden does not affect the parts East of it that much (constituencies Bautzen and Görlitz), most of the Dresden suburbs in Landkreis Bautzen are in the Dresden II-Bautzen II district. And they have always been the weakest constituencies for SPD and Linke/PDS in Saxony.

Intereistingly, there was a huge gap between the federal and state election result in Saxony (CDU polling much higher in the latter) between 1998 and 2005 that now finally closed. In 1998 even much of them wanted to get rid of Kohl, Schröder was highly popular in 2002 and Stoiber a bad fit for the East (Strauß had been quite popular in parts of Saxony, but mainly for the perception of helping the East German people (or at least care), 2005 had a large protest vote against the pro-market economic policies and the cuts in the social system by the Red/green administration. Their radical pro market platform that had been adopted at a federal party conference in Leipzig in 2003 maybe did not help them, either. 2009 was the electoral high peak of the anti-welfare-cut movement on the one hand, had ridiculously high FDP results on the other and the state CDU was shook by several scandals at the time.

It seems for the first time Merkel got a bonus for being perceived a good fit for the East German political culture. (Noone remembers her and the CDU's radical pro market "Leipzig platform" of