🇩🇪 German state & local elections

[Tender Branson]

The FDP is constantly at around 4.9% with 15% of (mostly rural) precincts counted.

I think it’s fair to say they will end up crossing the 5% threshold ...

[jaichind]

Greens losing ground from 2014 so far. Excellent

[Tender Branson]

Greens losing ground from 2015 so far. Excellent

The situation in East Germany and especially in Thüringen today is sort of an odd, unorthodox one for the Green Party:

In West Germany, Austria and Switzerland the Greens had big increases recently because of the climate issue.

Not so in East Germany.

Why ?

Potential Green voters voted for highly popular Left Governor Bodo Ramelow to stop the AfD from becoming strongest party.

They did the same in Saxony with the CDU and in Brandenburg with the SPD.

That’s not needed in West Germany or Austria, where the AfD or FPÖ is far away from becoming the largest party.

And that’s on top of East Germany being in general very rural and less educated, where Greens do badly and where voters remember strongly their welcome clapping for migrants after 2015 ...

[Tender Branson]

With 25% of the vote counted, turnout is only 58% ...

How is that possible ?

Maybe the postal votes are missing ? But they are usually counted together with the other votes ... strange.

[Pick Up the Phone]

Mohring: "Ramelow's government has no majority anymore. There is no majority for the left anymore. The citizens of Thuringia deserve a real government, not a provisional one." Blah-blah-blah.

Difficult situation for Mohring. I guess he doesn't want to make any move without talking to Berlin first. His campaign and his approval numbers were both okay, but he's now formally responsible for the weakest result the CDU ever got in the state. Actually, it's the first time since the reunification of Germany that the Thuringian CDU isn't the largest party there. 

The SPD leadership doesn't even pretend that it expected a better result. The Greens are obviously disappointed but they have currently more important things to care about than Thuringia. The FDP is probably the real winner tonight; seems that they'll narrowly pass the threshold.

[Astatine]

New ZDF projection sees Greens behind FDP now at 5.3 % and increasingly closer to the 5 % threshold (FDP: 5.5 %), but seems quite quite unlikely that they will drop out of Parliament although their perfomance in rural areas is still quite bad (narrowly above 3 % in current vote count). ARD sees FDP behind Greens, still at exactly 5 percent.

current projections ZDF/ARD

CDU 22.2/22.7
Left 29.5/29.6
AfD 23.8/23.6
SPD 8.0/8.7
FDP 5.5/5.0
Greens 5.3/5.4

[Astatine]

This evening appears to be even more of a nailbiter for FDP and Greens, ARD sees both at 5.0 %, ZDF both at 5.1 %.

With 90 % of the votes countes, the FDP is at 4.97 % and the Greens are at 4.8 %. Although not that likely as most of the precincts still due to be report are more urban, this could be the first election since 2006 in which the FDP enters a state parliament while the Greens do not.

The irony: In first votes (constituency votes), the Greens are at 6.0 % and the FDP at 5.2 %...

[Beezer]

Amazing that the CDU somehow manages to lose 11 points despite having a leftist government in power. And apparently the CDU may very well arrive at the conclusion that joining Ramelow in government will be the right response to this.

[Tender Branson]

This evening appears to be even more of a nailbiter for FDP and Greens, ARD sees both at 5.0 %, ZDF both at 5.1 %.

With 90 % of the votes countes, the FDP is at 4.97 % and the Greens are at 4.8 %. Although not that likely as most of the precincts still due to be report are more urban, this could be the first election since 2006 in which the FDP enters a state parliament while the Greens do not.

The irony: In first votes (constituency votes), the Greens are at 6.0 % and the FDP at 5.2 %...

Nope.

A lot of Erfurt is still missing and once this is counted, both Greens and FDP will easily be in.

[Keep Calm and ...]

2867 of 3017 polling stations counted
FDP 4,9938%
Greens 4,9602%

[Astatine]

This evening appears to be even more of a nailbiter for FDP and Greens, ARD sees both at 5.0 %, ZDF both at 5.1 %.

With 90 % of the votes countes, the FDP is at 4.97 % and the Greens are at 4.8 %. Although not that likely as most of the precincts still due to be report are more urban, this could be the first election since 2006 in which the FDP enters a state parliament while the Greens do not.

The irony: In first votes (constituency votes), the Greens are at 6.0 % and the FDP at 5.2 %...

Nope.

A lot of Erfurt is still missing and once this is counted, both Greens and FDP will easily be in.

Yup, both about 100 votes away from reaching 5 % with precincts still reporting seeing Greens at 9 % and FDP at 6 %.

[Astatine]

Current constituency vote:

CDU 27.5 % (-10.2)
Left 25.4 % (-4.0)
AfD 22.4 % (+20.1) - they only ran candidates in 9 constituencies last time
SPD 10.8 % (-4.
Greens 6.3 % (+0.3)
FDP 5.3 % (+2.7)

If the seats were distributed according to that result, we would see the following Landtag:

CDU 24
Left 23
AfD 20
SPD 10
Greens 6
FDP 5

But as the constituency votes do not really matter, this just a speculative "what if"...

[Tender Branson]

Greens are now officially in, but for the FDP it’s tougher than I thought.

They have fallen back to 4.96% ...

[Pick Up the Phone]

LINKE even a good bit stronger than in the exit polls. Almost cracking 31% right now.

And while the fascist AfD is getting 23.X%, at least their ideological allies of the NPD are finally on the verge of completely disappearing into irrelevance. Almost 3 percentage points down to 0.6%.

[Tender Branson]

FDP @ 4.995%

97% of the precincts counted.

[Pick Up the Phone]

FDP @ 4.995%

4.999% now!

[Tender Branson]

FDP @ 4.995%

4.999% now!

4.9998% to be exactly ...

Every vote counts !

[Astatine]

FDP @ 4.995%

4.999% now!

4.9998% to be exactly ...

Every vote counts !

53 508 votes for FDP, 1 070 194 valid votes * 0,05 = 5 percent threshold at 53 510 votes, oooof.

Florida elections are not suspenseful at all in comparison to that one here.
Greens in Saarland 2012 (5.0 %) can confirm as well as Liberals in Saxony-Anhalt in 2016 (4.9 %) and Leftists in NRW in 2017 (4.9 %).

[urutzizu]

From the Exit Poll:
"Bodo Ramelow is a good Minister-President"( CDU Voters): 60% Agree
"Should the CDU stick to their exclusion of the Linke in Coalition talks" (CDU Voters)?  
stick to position: 28%
rethink: 68%.

For all the talk today about how "the extremes" have won, and equating the most moderate left premier with the most radical ethnonationalist AFD politican in Germany (because we totally have the stasi running around and wild expropriations everywhere in Thuringa... I hate this constant ridiculous "BoTh sIdEs" nonsense from the CDU and Lindner), the CDU will bite the Bullet and support Ramelow in some capacity or another. The werteunion is going to go completely off the rails, and there will be big losses foremost to the FDP among their clientel, but its gonna happen, I am sure.

[Tender Branson]

Pretty obvious that the CDU should make an exception here and govern with the Left.

Bodo is seen more as a SPD type Governor from the center, so I don’t know what the CDU’s problem is.

[Former President tack50]

Considering Linke+AfD have a majority and even Red-Red-Green won't be able to save this, what happens next? The only options I can find are Linke-CDU; Linke-SPD-Green-FDP and AfD-CDU-FDP.

None of which seems particularly good to me. Honestly I kind of hope for the last one in order to have clearly drawn left vs right lines, but I would be ok with the 4 party coalition as well (and if I lived in Thuringia I would hope for that one).

Linke-CDU is the one I am afraid of. If CDU starts doing deals with borderline commies (not that I have a problem with Linke, but I imagine a lot of German conservatives do) the German moderate right is dead. Which means a lot of moderate conservatives will start voting AfD, which is a very, very bad thing.

[jaichind]

Looks like FDP make it, for now.

[Tender Branson]

With the latest vote dump, the FDP now in !

By 15 votes, out of 1.1 million valid votes.

[Pick Up the Phone]

From the Exit Poll:
"Bodo Ramelow is a good Minister-President"( CDU Voters): 60% Agree
"Should the CDU stick to their exclusion of the Linke in Coalition talks" (CDU Voters)?  
stick to position: 28%
rethink: 68%.

For all the talk today about how "the extremes" have won, and equating the most moderate left premier with the most radical ethnonationalist AFD politican in Germany (because we totally have the stasi running around and wild expropriations everywhere in Thuringa... I hate this constant ridiculous "BoTh sIdEs" nonsense from the CDU and Lindner), the CDU will bite the Bullet and support Ramelow in some capacity or another. The werteunion is going to go completely off the rails, and there will be big losses foremost to the FDP among their clientel, but its gonna happen, I am sure.

Honestly, I don't think that Mohring will start any sort of coalition talks. The optics would be just too bad. Not only would this contradict everything he said on the campaign trail (and after the election: "No coalition with AfD and LINKE!"), it would also have serious political fallout for AKK in Berlin. And at the moment, there is no necessity. There's still the FDP and there's also still the option to lend temporary support to a minority government.

[crals]

Considering Linke+AfD have a majority and even Red-Red-Green won't be able to save this, what happens next? The only options I can find are Linke-CDU; Linke-SPD-Green-FDP and AfD-CDU-FDP.

None of which seems particularly good to me. Honestly I kind of hope for the last one in order to have clearly drawn left vs right lines, but I would be ok with the 4 party coalition as well (and if I lived in Thuringia I would hope for that one).

Linke-CDU is the one I am afraid of. If CDU starts doing deals with borderline commies (not that I have a problem with Linke, but I imagine a lot of German conservatives do) the German moderate right is dead. Which means a lot of moderate conservatives will start voting AfD, which is a very, very bad thing.

They still have the FDP in the moderate right