2011 State Elections in Germany

[Antonio the Sixth]

The youth massively voted for the far-right before ? I didn't know that. Of course voting pirate is better than voting for the nazis, but it would be nice to have the youth voting for the party they should vote for (ie the left ).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Final list vote:

SPD 28.3
CDU 23.4
Grüne 17.6
Linke 11.7
Piraten 8.9

NPD 2.1
FDP 1.8
Tierschutzpartei 1.5
Die PARTEI 0.9

And a couple of parties with even less.....not worth listing.

Depressing.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Depressing.

What exactly?

Poor results for the left, useless Pirates at 9%, red-greens barely having a majority. We could have expected far better from this election.

[Antonio the Sixth]

How much votes there ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Anyways, I suppose the question is... should I bother doing an FDP map? I also see that the Pirates have adopted orange as their colour, and so orange they shall have to be...

Would an FDP map tell us anything?

No, but we could look at the most yellow districts and laugh at them.

[Antonio the Sixth]

When will the Schleswig-Holstein election be held exactly ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

*facepalm*

[Antonio the Sixth]

I also strongly doubt the Pirates will actually win seats in the next federal elections. Things like these are fads.

I really hope you are right.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Pathetic, but not surprising. Blame it on those stupid voters who prefered to vote for useless parties.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Is it just me or does she look a bit like Princess Leia from Star Wars ?

Wut ? Nah.

However, the guy to her left somewhat reminds me of Hurley from Lost.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Atfer the techno bubble, the housing bubble, now there is the Pirates bubble.

It will hurt when it will burst.

I hope it burst soon. One-issue outfits don't deserve to get more than 1%, especially when this issue is so pathetically unimportant.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Atfer the techno bubble, the housing bubble, now there is the Pirates bubble.

It will hurt when it will burst.

I hope it burst soon. One-issue outfits don't deserve to get more than 1%, especially when this issue is so pathetically unimportant.

The Pirates bubble exists for the very reason that they are not seen so much a single-issue-party than a diffuse anti-establishment protest party.

Anti-establishmentism sucks too.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Looks like the Piratemania is giving the FDP the final kick to ensure they fall into utter irrelevancy.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Merkel has decided that she has found another principle that needs to be thrown out of the window:

It appears that a general minimum wage is currently being planned.

About time.

Indeed. The question being, why in the world the social-democrats, who have been in power for 20 years from 1945 on, have never implemented it.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wonder how much it will be set at, BTW. In France, the SMIC is at 9€ per hour.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I wonder how much it will be set at, BTW. In France, the SMIC is at 9€ per hour.

The SPD currently supports 8.50 EUR, I doubt it will be higher than that.

I somehow imagined that it would be lower than in France. That said, I don't know what is the difference in prices between France and Germany. I guess they are lower in Germany, right ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

In 10 days there will be a referendum on Stuttgart 21.

Currently 55% are in favor of the new train station, while 45% are opposed.

BTW: Support is up 2% and opposition is up 13% compared with the August poll.

Even though the left-wing parties currently have a 53-40 lead in the state (57-40 if you factor in the Pirates), it will still be hard for the opposing side to close the gap in the last 9 days. Probably a lot of SPD-voters will vote for the new station, maybe they are even split 50-50 - while most Green voters will vote against it.

Anyway, at least 1/3 of all people have to vote so that the result is valid.

If the quorum is not met, what happens ? Will they build it or not ?

Though I guess it will be, if the issue is as divisive as it seems.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think it's a fair system. The 33% requirement isn't hard to meet if the topic interests enough people, and it ensures the decision is taken only if a reasonable share of the population supports it. The italian system is far worse, as it require a turnout rate above 50% counting both yes and no votes, which encourage opponents to just abstain to ensure the proposal fails.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think it's a fair system. The 33% requirement isn't hard to meet if the topic interests enough people, and it ensures the decision is taken only if a reasonable share of the population supports it. The italian system is far worse, as it require a turnout rate above 50% counting both yes and no votes, which encourage opponents to just abstain to ensure the proposal fails.

Yeah, you are right.

But still, 65% turnout would be about what is needed for this thing to pass (well, fail actually).

And I doubt if a simple referendum can do that if the state election only had 66% turnout.

It all depends on how motivated the "yes" supporters are. I'm sure it's possible to find 33% of registered voters who oppose Stuttgart 21, so all lies on GOTV operations. After all, Italy managed to have 50.86% (!) of its registered voters say no to nuclear energy.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think it would be better to have a 50% turnout requirement in this case and a binding "Yes/No vote out of those who voted.

No, this system sucks balls. It encourages "no" voters to abstain.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think it's a fair system. The 33% requirement isn't hard to meet if the topic interests enough people, and it ensures the decision is taken only if a reasonable share of the population supports it. The italian system is far worse, as it require a turnout rate above 50% counting both yes and no votes, which encourage opponents to just abstain to ensure the proposal fails.

Yeah, you are right.

But still, 65% turnout would be about what is needed for this thing to pass (well, fail actually).

And I doubt if a simple referendum can do that if the state election only had 66% turnout.

It all depends on how motivated the "yes" supporters are. I'm sure it's possible to find 33% of registered voters who oppose Stuttgart 21, so all lies on GOTV operations. After all, Italy managed to have 50.86% (!) of its registered voters say no to nuclear energy.

The problem is, 33% of 7.630.000 people would be 2.518.000 people.

And in the state elections, the Greens only managed to get 1.2 Mio. votes.

So, if the No-side just decides to stay at home - they have already won.

Whether the no side stays home or votes no, it technically can't impact the quorum (contrary, again, to what happens in Italy). If, however, the yes side doesn't turn out in great numbers, they won't be able to pass it. I find it fair that a reasonable share of the voters have to support a policy in order for it to be implemented.

The true problem is, of course, that the burden lies on the "yes" side. Which means that if people don't care enough about the station, it will be built by default. This is of course contestable, but I guess that's the State government's choice.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It was explained one page ago.

But I don't understand why they are so unpopular. I was under the impression that Merkel was wayyy more "centrist" than any previous CDU leader and had opened up a large vacuum on the right. I would have thought that if anything this would be the perfect time for the FDP to increase support since they are essentially the only rightwing party in Germany! - I suppose the only explanation might be that by being in coalition with the CDU they have lost any identity of their own and have almost nothing to show the people who voted for them...kind of like the Li bDems in the UK who also face obliteration.

^^ Yeah, that's it.

And the truth is that most of the younger FDP politicians simply suck at governing. Problem is that most leadership positions in the party are currently filled by those younger politicians.

Ah well, and there was this Mövenpick scandal earlier during this administration which reinforced the FDP's image that the party is for hire for any company who can afford to buy legislation from the FDP. They never really recovered from that, I suppose.

In short, the FDP's image is that they're incompetent, corrupt and that they're not keeping their campaign promises. This doesn't leave many redeeming qualities.

[Antonio the Sixth]

"No" meant "build the station", right ?