German Elections & Politics

[palandio]

I would think so. The thing is that she has already founded an informal side project, a so called Left-wing rally movement. Other prominent members seem to include her husband Oskar Lafontaine, veteran SPD politician Rudolf Dreßler, SPD MPs Cansel Kiziltepe and Marco Bülow and intellectual Bernd Stegemann.

The thing is that while the official goal is not to split the Left, but to attract disappointed voters from SPD, Greens and other parties, I don't get how this would work inside the LINKE.

[palandio]

The Left is not immolating itself, but it has made clear on which side it wants to gain and on which side it is ready to lose. It's a logical decision, too, because you cannot go against the majority of your own party functionaries. But it leaves a void in the political landscape.

[palandio]

Interestingly Markus Söder is actually protestant.

In my opinion being a Franconian protestant is one reason why he tries even harder to appeal to (pre-Napoleonic) Old Bavarian catholic conservatives. Speak about compensation.

[palandio]

Philip Oltermann's article in the Guardian is not very clear on many points and factually wrong on many other points, so it is no wonder that you misunderstood a lot of things.

Firstly what is discussed in the article is not Die Linke's approach, but that of Sahra Wagenknecht (who is one of two leaders of the parliamentary caucus and not party chairwoman like the article counterfactually claims). Wagenknecht's position seems to be minoritarian within her party and a new political movement along her ideas would imho have to be a split from Die Linke and not an extension of Die Linke.

And the term 'national social' is not used by anyone from Wagenknecht's supporters, but only by journalist Philip Oltermann, whose sympathies don't seem to fall on the 'national social' side at all. In fact his stance seems to be more or less what can be expected from a journalist writing for the Guardian or most other newspapers. Wagenknecht and her supporters certainly have their flaws, but the way he has written his "report" can only be called intellectually dishonest.

Apart from that you are of course right to cast a lot of doubt on the possible success of such an initiative. And the 'national social' theme will of course be played a lot and this will not favor them.

[palandio]

SPD + Greens +Linke are now pretty reliably polling in the 40-42% region, which is still a pretty undeniable move on the combined 38.5% they got in September. Amid all the talk about the AFD surge, that seems to be worth pointing out

SPD + Greens + Linke have been polling over 40% for most of the last 14 months.

[palandio]

Talk about a surge for The Greens (relative to their '17 election results). I assume the growth in their numbers is primarily at the expense of the SPD? Is there a legitimate chance that The Greens eclipse the SPD during the next federal election, thereby making the three largest parties the CSU, Afd, and Grüne?

That's a common mistake: The Greens mostly gain from the CDU/CSU's more liberal wings, not from the SPD. The AfD gains from the SPD.

Neither interpretation is wrong. Voters from both CDU/CSU and SPD are going towards both AfD and the Greens, reflecting the strengthening nationalist vs. internationalist cleavage, because these two parties are ones that have the clearest position.

[palandio]

Yes, it is likely that Wagenknecht and her supporters won't be able to steer Linke, SPD and Greens in the direction they want. And then what? The next logical step would be to transform Aufstehen into a political party and run for elections on their own. (German law is quite strict about admitting only proper parties to elections and would not tolerate many of the shenanigans occurring in France, the Netherlands and other countries.)

[palandio]

Two weeks ago a poll by Emnid, commissioned by the Focus news magazine, found out that 34% can immagine voting for a "Sahra Wagenknecht list", including 87% of Linke voters, 53% of Green voters and 37% of SPD voters.

We all know that polls like this are not to be taken at face value. What I think is true is that:
- There is potential for "charismatic" left of center politics. (cf. the Martin Schulz hype)
- There is potential for an SPD that takes distance from parts of its former reformist agenda.
- There is potential for left-wing nationalism.
The challenge for Wagenknecht and her allies is to bring all of this together, to persist in the public discussion and to succeed on the electoral market. That will be really difficult. Additionally this project has a massive potential to attract conspiracy theorists, radical "Israel critics" and various other unappetizing folks who would eventually completely derail the whole thing.

[palandio]

If by "seats" you mean two or more seats, definitely not. There is an outside chance that they reach one seat, because they would only need ca. 0.5%.

I just don't see who would vote for Frauke Petry now apart from a small fraction of people in her constituency, maybe.

[palandio]

Most natural coalition partner regarding the overall political orientation. The only problem is that they may be too similar and that it would deprive the Freie Wähler of a part of their reason to exist.

[palandio]

By CDU standards this is open rebellion. (More normal by SPD standards...) Merkel is in serious trouble.

[palandio]

Something like autumn of 2019 would make sense in my opinion, giving her successor enough time, but not overhastening things and not making it look like a forced move.

[palandio]

Party affiliation/preferences of Germans w/ and w/o a migration background:



Among Turkish Germans:



Among ethnic Germans from EEurope that migrated back to Germany, usually after the 1980s:



Source: https://www.svr-migration.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/SVR_Parteipraeferenzen_2018.pdf

I find it worth mentioning that they released the party preferences of people without a migrational background, too. Results were CDU/CSU 37.6%, SPD 17.2%, Greens 17.0%, Left 9.2%, AfD 9.6%, FDP 7.0%, others 2.5%. The polling period was between July 2017 and January 2018. The study is claiming representativity for its sub-samples, but considering the results of the federal election and polls from that period, it is clear that the published numbers are raw data and don't account for effects of social desirability etc. (which requires of course a lot of special sauce...)

[palandio]

Fascinating to watch AfD and Greens go up (and sometimes down) so completely parallelly. They really are two sides of the same medal.

[palandio]

It's a shame that Sepp Daxenberger isn't around anymore.

Wasn't he reported to be unable to cope with his duties of being mayor?

Source? As far as I know, he served two full terms (twelve years) as mayor. I don't know about the last two years or so, apparently his cancer caused his condition to go up and down.

[palandio]

The normal case during the last years has been that the Linke polled at ca. 5% in the big Western German states before the regional elections, only to then fall short of the threshold (notable exception: Hesse).

It really depends. The federal election results for the Linke have been quite good for them (in Western Germany), but until proven otherwise I still would assume many of the new Linke voters not to be reliable.

Expect something like 3.5% Linke in Bavaria.

[palandio]

[...]
They state that 80-85% pass vocational exams and other good tidbits.  Good to see the bright future for them and the collapse of the CSU in favor of a greener future.
[...]

Keep in mind that the positive numbers refer to the minority who actually persues vocational training and that this is the result of a concentrated effort by politics, enterprises and schools in an economically prosperous region governed by the CSU.
In fact one could be quite sad that the pragmatic CSU is getting punished and that voters prefer AfD (less integration) or Greens (more uncontrolled immigration means less attention to the single immigrant means less integration).

[palandio]

[...]
They state that 80-85% pass vocational exams and other good tidbits.  Good to see the bright future for them and the collapse of the CSU in favor of a greener future.
[...]

Keep in mind that the positive numbers refer to the minority who actually persues vocational training and that this is the result of a concentrated effort by politics, enterprises and schools in an economically prosperous region governed by the CSU.
In fact one could be quite sad that the pragmatic CSU is getting punished and that voters prefer AfD (less integration) or Greens (more uncontrolled immigration means less attention to the single immigrant means less integration).

Most immigrants do want to integrate, as stated here and elsewhere. The lazy colored person schtick is nothing but an excuse to implement austerity. I would have thought the Euros here would have discovered that from being on a US political board, but alas.

I never said that the reason for the low employment of recent non-regular immigrants was them being lazy.

[palandio]

Yes, it is highly debateable which voter associations on the county/city level can be counted as Free Voters. Even other parties run under labels like "Green open list", "CSU and free voter association", "SPD and independents", etc. and I'm not sure which of these are counted as voter associations and which not.

[palandio]

I really don't know what this is about. I defend the CSU and their right to take their line on Muslim immigration, which was extremely high in Germany a few years ago. But it is unambiguous that the main force behind the decline of the SPD was not good ol' boys angry about transgender and pronouns, but a collapse toward the Greens. It's not a surprise that people on this forum are more angry about anti-fascists than neo-Nazis. But come on, recognise reality here that your rise is inciting the rise of forces against you, like the Greens. AfD mainly gained from CSU. Greens mainly gained from SPD. Disregard models you cannot prove or even throw out a window.

Net voter flows actually seem to be quite complex:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bayern-waehlerwanderung-101.html

[palandio]

I really don't know what this is about. I defend the CSU and their right to take their line on Muslim immigration, which was extremely high in Germany a few years ago. But it is unambiguous that the main force behind the decline of the SPD was not good ol' boys angry about transgender and pronouns, but a collapse toward the Greens. It's not a surprise that people on this forum are more angry about anti-fascists than neo-Nazis. But come on, recognise reality here that your rise is inciting the rise of forces against you, like the Greens. AfD mainly gained from CSU. Greens mainly gained from SPD. Disregard models you cannot prove or even throw out a window.

Net voter flows actually seem to be quite complex:
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bayern-waehlerwanderung-101.html

I don't regard these models as being serious, something I'd bet my house on.

You are right not to consider these models the gospel, but I think that you cannot disregard them completely. Incoming regional results show a strong correlation between SPD losses and Green gains. But usually the SPD losses are higher in the constituencies that are already counted, which skew heavily rural and Eastern/Northern.

My theory is that there are some long term voter movements between the political camps, too. But that the rise of the Greens and the fall of the SPD during the last weeks and months has been mostly a result of direct movement from SPD towards the Greens.

[palandio]

In my opinion the electoral campaign went not so well for the CSU. My reasoning:

After the federal election pollsters and analysts over-adjusted their CSU numbers, going by the federal election result and failing to differentiate between federal and regional election. After Markus Söder became PM on March 16, polls showed the CSU recovering at 41-44%, which in reality was probably more like 46%, which due to the electoral law could even have meant a close majority. From then everything went downhill. The smaller part of the blame goes to Markus Söder and his actionism, the bigger part of the blame to Seehofer's and Merkel's infighting. I'm not even sure if subconsciously Seehofer didn't want to harm Söder's prospects. The main beneficiaries, if the polls are to be believed at least in relative terms, were the Free Voters. They were basically an option for people who wanted CSU politics more or less, but didn't like the federal CDU/CSU/SPD drama.

Regarding the AfD result, if the voter movement analysis is to be believed at least to some degree, less than one fourth of the AfD voters come from the CSU. Apart from that its support is pretty much limited to a right-leaning protest potential that for historical reasons is bigger than e.g. in Lower Saxony, and that probably was difficult to reach from the begin. In that sense CSU and FW were quite effective in reaching those right-leaners that could actually be reached.

On the other hand while the Greens gained, and a part of that from the CSU, there was no net voter flow towards the parties that clearly stand to the left of the CSU on immigration (Greens, SPD, Linke). And therefore in my opinion it cannot be said that the CSU was punished for its relatively hard line on immigration more than it was rewarded, because otherwise there would have been a net voter flow.

[palandio]

I think quite a few voters intended to vote FDP or AfD but came home for CSU, convinced by their campaign. Hence the difference between the trendline in the pre-election polls and the result. Perhaps these people were always going to vote for the CSU - but perhaps not. And I definitely think CSU's hardline stance on immigration may have been part of what it took to have these voters come home.

Yes, I think that, too. Some people understood that by not voting CSU they would have weakened the CSU in Berlin even more and that a vote for e.g. the AfD would be interpreted by CDU/CSU along the line "See, these people cannot be reached by going to the right, so let's go to the left".

[palandio]

A CSU outperformed the polls
B CSU is superior to CDU because CDU-CSU is polling poorly nationally
If one believes A, shouldn't one be sceptical about B?

One should definitely be skeptical. On the other hand there are some reasons to believe that the underpolling was CSU-specific. But it is difficult to verify these ideas. Maybe the Hesse election in two weeks can shed slightly more light on this.

[palandio]

Question for Hades, you mentioned some parts of German cities where due to Turk/Arab situation police don't have a presence, and school system is bad to be a non-Moslem.  What would be the prime example of such places?

Can't say if it is really like they say, but the stereotypical places that are usually mentioned are:
- Berlin-Neukölln (mostly the locality proper, not the outer parts of the borough; and the most central parts not anymore due to gentrification, but still massive headlines about Mhallami and Palestinian-Lebanese clan criminality)
- Duisburg-Marxloh
- parts of Berlin-Wedding
- sometimes areas in the north of Essen are mentioned (e.g. Altenessen)
- unspecified parts of Bremen