Hamburg Elections today

[minionofmidas]

Today, there are early polls in Hamburg after the previous CDU-FDP-Schill coalition broke apart.
The last opinion polls foresaw massive gains for the CDU, to about 45%, and a neck-on-neck race between the CDU alone and SPD and Greens together. Both the FDP and Schill's new party PRO DM/Schill, were expected to fail the 5% threshold requred for representation. However, German polls have a history of underestimating far-right support.

[minionofmidas]

The CDU has won a majority of the seats, with 47,2% of the vote.
The SPD got 30,5% and the Greens 12,3%.
Schill at 3,1% and the FDP at 2,8% ran below expectations.
Oh, and Olivia Jones got 0,5%, while the remainder of Schill's former party got only 0,4%.
Oddly enough, in the district elections held at the same time, four districts voted in red-green majorities, two have CDU majorities and the last one is hung because Schill's supporters polled just over 5% there.

[minionofmidas]

The city didn't go CDU in a landslide. Effectively they soaked up all the former Schill votes but didn't get much cross over vote from the left. They gained a hell of a lot but they still have only 4,4% more than red and green together, and 63 out of 121 seats. (Proportional elections...)
But I thought the district results a bit surprising, too. The CDU's best result is in the biggest one, Wandsbek, which may help to explain it. Also, it seems the Greens did a good deal better in the districts than citywide, at least partly due to left-wing protest and joke alternatives draining votes from them in the city and not standing in the districts.

[minionofmidas]

If the election hadn't resulted in an absolute majority, I would have left the poll open. We sometimes had coalitions with more partners than necessary in the 1950's, but not since.
I got this poll up a wee bit late, polling stations were already open by that time...
Oh, and on the outbreak of ticket splitting: In Bundestag elections and in most states, you have two votes, for direct election candidate and the important one for the proportional allocation of seats. Not so in Hamburg: There's no direct candidates there. So maybe the kind of people (like your correspondent) who like to use one of their votes sensibly and one to register a protest, did so by splitting between City and District elections.
I think both Schill and the FDP did better in the districts - but not good enough to cross 5%, thus resulting in loss of votes on the right.

[minionofmidas]

Schill said he'd leave Germany if he wasn't at least reelected to the Assembly months ago. So I guess he felt the need to say it again after the election. Much as I'd like to see him go, I doubt it for now.
The "I'll leave this country!" "threat" has been all over right-wing internet fora ever since Schroeder was first elected, so Schill isn't being original.
I doubt he was ever that sane, but sanity is a relative concept.

Thueringen will have state polls on the same day as the European Elections, 13.6.
Brandenburg, Saxony and Saarland will be voting in September.
There's also lots of local elections, I don't know any dates, and the presidential mini-election in May. The president is elected by all the members of the Bundestag plus an equal number of electors nominated by the state parliaments, and the CDU/CSU can have the post if they get a handful of FDP people to vote for them. Somehow they have not yet been able to find a candidate. It seems many in the CDU want Stoiber out of the way as president, but he doesn't want himself.