German Elections & Politics

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That's a rarity: the FDP poking over the threshold for once.

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I don't really know. Short of raising taxes, Merkel has capitulated on literally every economic issue the FDP could attack her on from the right, and still the FDP can't take advantage. Worse, they can't really act as a right-wing protest vote sponge because of the AfD.

I don't think the FDP is quite at PASOK level terminal decline, but unless it carves out a niche it'll be pretty much gone.

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Why do you think that you can infer more from European election polls than from federal election polls about state elections? To me that seems counter-intuitive. In European election polls the AfD is consistently polling ca. 1-2% more than in federal election polls.

I can think of three reasons:

* Voters like Merkel, but not her party. Therefore, they're going to swing against the CDU without the risk of losing her. That includes the right flank which is attracted to AfD.

* The AfD's Eurosceptic message is more attractive than its views on running the country federally (see: UKIP).

* People voting in these elections are less pragmatic and more idealogical than the general election crowd,

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The facebook likes of the major German parties. First, because I like to be Tender Branson in disguise for Mr Bear, King of Animals, and secondly, because we have the first party with more than 100,000 likes.

100.007 AfD
89.341 Pirates
77.894 CDU
70.505 SPD
66.954 Left
48.639 Greens
27.634 FDP
21.730 CSU

So, AfD and Pirates have more Facebook likes than they have party members, and CDU, SPD, Greens, FDP, and CSU have more party members than they have Facebook likes.

(Coincidentally, the Left has about the same number of likes as they have members, although I strongly suspect that both groups aren't remotely identical.)

If anything, it could tell something about the structure of a party's supporter base and their level of commitment. While AfD and Pirate supporters are more likely to publicly declare their support for their party on the Web, they're also more unlikely to actually engage in real-life political activities. This leads to a phenomenon which I would describe as "desk activists". People who are posting loads of stuff on the Web from their home or at work, but lack the will or the interest to go to party events or participate in more "active activities".

Secondly, it also reflects the form of communication AfD and Pirates conduct as newer, and less established political parties. Facebook is probably used as a cheaper and easyily managable  alternative to other channels of communication which the more established parties regularly use, but AfD and Pirates don't (yet) possess because of a lack of ressources.

And thirdly, it's also a matter of age structure and how familiar with the Internet someone's base is. Pirate supporters are obviously much younger and much more Web-orentied than CSU supporters.

The main surprise that when I first saw them was the Greens. I assumed they would have a younger, savvy base that competes with the Pirates. I suppose that shows how much the German Greens have become part of the furniture.

Also this thread (and Enno's posts) post scare me. Because on my CV it says I can speak German "well". And I just realised I literally cannot understand a single word on those opinion polls above I only stopped learning two years ago as well.

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In Saxony, if FDP falls below 5%, will CDU go for a CDU-AfD alliance or will we have the CDU-SPD just like everywhere else.

I assume CDU-SPD. AfD probably prefers to be outside for now.

The wiki page for this election has a summary of potential coalitions, in slightly broken English.

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Where can we find recent polling for Bremen and Hamburg?

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I'm pretty sure the AfD will get easily into the Hamburg parliament (senate) early next year.

They will likely get 6-8% and not the 10-12% in the East, but they will easily get in.

I think the AfD would likely enter in pretty much every Bundesland at this point.

Unless they implode Pirates style.

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It's interesting that the Alliance has not put the slightest dent on the CDU's numbers.

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It's interesting that the Alliance has not put the slightest dent on the CDU's numbers.

Alliance?

Well this is awkward :/

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So the Neue Liberals are social liberals eh? Well good luck to them, but I do wonder whether the niche they want to fill is already occupied by the Greens...

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So have the FDP in Hamburg found a four leaved clover or something?

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What's happened to The AfD state caucuses?

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Btw how is the new LITERALLT STALIN government doing in Thuringia?

(Also, the tail-end of the Green government of BW?)

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Alfa? Really going for the RedPiller vote I see, lmao

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What about the split from AfD?

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Lol at DIE PARTIE

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If the CSU go turncoat, I hope the CDU finally runs in Bavaria and kills off the bums from Bavaria for good. I will then officially retract every mean thing I've said about mutti merkel.

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Tbf Merkel is a ridiculously wily politician. A lot of people have written her off before but she always manages to electorally demolish her opponents.

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Is it impossible to form a minority government in Germany? Like, why can't the SPD and Greens form a coalition, and be supported on the outside by Linke?

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Well, assuming the migrant crisis doesn't stay in the news till 2017 (although it could, I guess), thing can snap to a "status quo" very easily. German voters did that last time, irt the brief Greenmania and the Pirates. Only time will tell if the AfD can pull off a lasting colonisation of the right space of German politics against the colossus of the CDU party machine.



What's the FDP's reaction to the crisis btw? I notice they've dipped up in the polls.

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Wasn't there this odd trend a few years back where the courts were declaring war on electoral thresholds? Is that still occurring?

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I mean, this looks very bad (or good, if you're inclined that way) but isn't really indicative of future elections. Remember the Pirate phenomena? Remember when people started to confidently assume the Green surge would last?

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I mean, this looks very bad (or good, if you're inclined that way) but isn't really indicative of future elections. Remember the Pirate phenomena? Remember when people started to confidently assume the Green surge would last?

I don't agree. The Pirate phenomenon wasn't a pan-European thing, at least not nearly in the way radical right-wing phenomenon has been over the last two decades. Germany was an anomaly for the Pirate surge, yet it was an anomaly for not having a strong radical right-wing party. That has now changed. Of course that does not necessarily say anything about the future, but if you look at the rest of Western Europe, radical right-wing parties are popular basically everywhere. Germany has the exact same fertile soil for such parties to emerge and be successful, it just took the refugee crisis for AfD to really break through the "ceiling of shame" regarding Germany's past. I don't know if AfD will last, but I think the radical right, as a political force, will remain important in Germany, just as I'm not confident that the Dutch PVV will last yet I know the radical right will stay. I don't see any evidence in Europe to think otherwise.

Besides, given the result in BaWü one could hardly say the Green surge did not last there...

The thing is, I'm not a huge believer in pan-European trends - it's very tempting but it tends to lead to wankery if you rely on it too much. The CDU is an extraordinarily successful machine at hoovering the right, and the AfD has to work against the fact that a large swathe of German voters like to use state elections to experiment, and then come home in the federal election (the closure of the Balkan route will also gradually dissipate the urgency of the refugee crisis). Arguably the Pirates did fill a niche - an anti-establishment bank for voters - especially working-class males - that is now filled by AfD.

Red-Green should come to their senses and go for coalitions with Left to give a perspective of change to Germans.

The East German Greens, which descend from an anti-regime protest group, may one of the sources of friction there.

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Why are Greens having a minor bounce lately?

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In all fairness the centrist position at the moment is to outsource the shooting of border crossing Muslims to Erdogan