Elections in Germany update:No turn to the right, after all!

re PDS: I think, I knew every PDS-official in our county personally: a social worker I was quite friendly with (working as civil servant with the county) and two of his friends.)

No-one really voted them, besides, I think, some dozens from the former GDR. Now they got here 4.6%.

The mayor thing is 'hanging': since half an hour waiting for the remaining five districts. (Rather small ones, but who knows?)

Seems now, the conservative mayor candidate is getting 51+% (which would be a minus of 12%).

I agree.



I hope you are right. The last time we had a grand coalition, the NPD gained ground rapidly; also I'm worried that the Linke, Die Grünen, and the FDP will be a splintered and ineffective opposition, in effect turning Germany into pre-Haider Austria. (Permanent Grand Coalition, no realistic way for the people to sack the government.)


I agree this is one of the better features of German democracy. It's very nice I can vote for Libertarians and Greens, knowing that they have a realistic chance of governing something, and that they're not the kind of wingnuts you'd find in the American versions of those parties.

Mayor in Lippstadt is the conservative with 52% of the votes (a minus of 10.8%)

Because I've been reading the Tagesspiegel, Taz and Freitag especially regularly lately and because I really, really like the city (which is why I read those papers), I've been following the campaign in Berlin in particular.

It was already clear from the polls a week or two ago (right after Stoiber's and Schonbohm's mishaps) that the CDU was doing significantly worse there, and the SPD better, than nationally.

The preliminary results now confirm this. Whereas nationally, according to the latest prognoses, the SPD loses 4,4% and the CDU/CSU 3,2%, it's the other way around in Berlin: the SPD loses only 2,2% and the CDU/CSU all of 4,5%. What's more, the Leftists win even more here than nationally (+5,0% rather than +4,5%), and thus get over 16%. With that 16%, the 34% for the SPD and another 14% for the Greens, Berlin must be among the most leftwing cities of Europe.

Results by district delightfully confirm this. In Neukolln, former Christian-Democrat mayor Diepgen (who had to step down after eons in office after a corruption scandal) loses his bid against the Socialdemocrat incumbent. In outer East-Berlin's Treptow/Kopenick, Georg Gysi wins a seat that had eluded the ex-communists before. And in the downtown Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain district, the voters re-elected the Green Party's Christian Strobele, who three years ago became the first ever Green to win a district seat.

Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain is one of my two favourite German neighbourhoods, and politically it's great fun. It joins together the highly multicultural and legendary rebellious Kreuzberg neighbourhood (the historical home of West-Berlin's squatters movement and the stage for rowdy annual May Day riots) and the formerly East-Berlin Friedrichshain, a pre-war leftist bulwark that now, in postcommunist days, encompasses both a trendy scene around the Simon Dach Strasse and the ueber-DDR backdrop of the Karl Marx Allee's Stalinist kitsch (and matching inhabitants).

Three candidates fought a bitter contest for the district seat this time. Tellingly, they were a Turkish SPD'er running as a true Socialdemocrat and mostly mobilising the German-Turkish electorate, Strobele himself, a nationally known maverick leftist dissident within his Green Party, and the district's mayor, a representative of the ex-communist PDS. No other parties seriously stood a chance. ;-)

They must be having quite a party, the three of them! :-D

Sorry to hear the mayor still squeaked through. At least they got a scare.

Ströbele will be elected again directly in Berlin

(Link Berlin statistics)

In contrast to all previous appearances of the PDS in the Parliament, the new Leftist Party will have more representatives from the former West-Germany than from the former DDR (!), says the Tagesspiegel.

An evocative take on Merkel and the German voters from the Tagesspiegel:


They didnt jump.

I don't think, much will really vhange now ..... regarding the percantage.

In a forttnight, however, after the Dresden result(s), we'll see, how many extraordinary additional seats² the parties will get in parliament.

¹Due to the death of a candidate, general election in one Dresden constituency will be in two weeks.

²On the basis of second votes received a party is allocated a certain number of seats in parliament. The party wins (by a relative majority) in one federal state more direct seats in constituencies than they would be entitled to on the basis of the number of second votes. The additionally gained seat becomes a "Überhangmandat" (surplus seat).

Oh bugger.

I just spent twenty minutes writing an interesting expose on the race in Berlin-Pankow; a race that now ended unexpectedly anticlimactically, but was truly fascinating.

And it dissapeared into thin air. Must have accidentally clicked ctrl+w or something.

Darn it. OK, I'm out of here. G'night everyone.

OK, one more post on Berlin. From Walter's link: the almost complete results for Berlin-East and Berlin-West, in comparison.

Berlin-West:

SPD 40%
CDU 34%
Greens 13%
Leftists 5%
FDP 5%
NPD 1%

Berlin-East:

Leftists 35%
SPD 32%
CDU 15%
Greens 11%
FDP 3%
NPD 3%

Kinda thought-provoking, eh?

Heh - Die Welt summarizes the possibilities for coalition governments now as follows:

"Schwarz-Rot, Rot-Grün, Ampel, Rot-Rot-Grün oder "Jamaika"?!"

Jamaica?! I hadnt heard that one yet...

Cant seem to leave...

This one, in any case, is priceless.

First, Merkel's shock at having lead her party into election losses rather than the predicted plus.

Then, Schroeder's unequallable bravado: he's claiming the Chancellorship now! Despite the minus 4-5% for his party, despite his government coalition no longer having a majority, despite coming in second after the CDU/CSU, he says: only I am "in the position of being able to establish a stable government". In fact: "those who wanted a change in the Chancellor's office have failed grandiosely". The country wants Gerhard, says his party chief as well.

Merkel, undoubtedly surprised by this coup from leftfield, falls back on the obvious answer: "The strongest party in the Parliament should get to deliver the Chancellor". Seems clear enough.

But no sooner than she has stuck in this claim and marker, does the Welt homepage announce on its front page: taking into account the system of Ueberhangmandate, pollster Forsa now calculates that SPD and CDU will both get 222 seats in Parliament.





To be continued ...

Oooh!

I've changed the title of this thread again and added another paragraph to the opening post:

This picture just screams: "The country is not yours!"



"In der Parteizentrale der FDP verfolgen Zuschauer einer Großleinwand die 'Berliner Runde' mit CDU-Kanzlerkandidatin Angela Merkel. Parteianhänger und Journalisten verfolgen die Bekanntgabe der Ergebnisse bei der Bundestagswahl 2005." (From Sueddeutsche Zeitung)

[In the HQ of the free-market liberal FDP, party supporters and journalists look at Angela Merkel taking part in the election night debate of party leaders.]

Wow!

Interesting indeed!

Mebbe Schroeder et al had already done all their coalition stuff based on various numbers, and it's a done deal?

OK, so about Berlin-Pankow, cause if I dont write it again tonight Im never gonna do it.

Pankow is an East-Berlin district. It once was notorious for being the residence of the hotshots of the GDR regime, who later moved out into leafy Brandenburg, and there are still sure enough postcommunist 'horizontals' or 'concrete heads', as we call them in Dutch, left in the district, especially in the outerlying parts.

But the district also includes part of the downtown Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood, which in GDR-times was a hotbed of subversive activity (the communist regime tended to neglect old inner city neighbourhoods to the point of dilapitation, and artists and counterculturals moved in where others left). This neighbourhood turned into one of the trendiest, hippest areas of Berlin after the Wende, when the rippling effect of gentrification gradually lapped northward up from Mitte. And the gentrification came with many Wessis moving in, be it young hipsters and sophisticated Greens rather than yuppies.

After the Wende, Pankow was the territory of the ex-communist PDS. But then Wolfgang Thierse, the Socialdemocrats' figurehead Ossi, snatched it from them. He won easily in 2002, with the support of the Greens.

There was no such support this time around though. Three former dissidents from GDR times stood for election in the district, and whereas Thierse was safe in the security that even if he didnt win the district, he would get into Parliament on his party's regional proportional representation list, the other two were not. For them it was a matter of political survival.

For the Greens, Werner Schulz contested Thierse's seat. He was the man who went to the Constitutional Court to try to have the early elections cancelled, and perhaps on a related note, failed to win a safe place on the Green Party's regional prop-rep list.

Gunter Nooke, meanwhile, made history in the mid-nineties by switching from the Greens/Alliance '90 list to the Christian-Democrats: from (then) the far left to the right, out of protest against regional co-operation with the ex-communists. He became a nationally known MP, but nevertheless the Berlin Christian-Democrats didnt grant him a safe place on the regional list either - they instead opted for a shortlist wholly free of former East-Germans. For him, too, Pankow was thus his only remaining chance.

To complicate matters further, the Leftists had not forgotten that this area was once PDS territory, and they wanted it back. So they sent in the young regional party boss Stefan Liebich, hoping to be the fourth dog who gets away with the bone while the others fight.

The contest drew much national media attention, often with hyperbolic headlines: Hauptstadtwahlkampf: Endstation Pankow, Im Bezirk der Bürgerrechtler, Wahlkreis der Abschiede, Kampfplatz der Prominenz, Die Prominenten-Quadriga, Männer mit Vergangenheit, DDR-Bürgerrechtler: Die Helden der Wende treten ab or, scurrilously, „Drei Bärte sind zwei zu viel".

But the end result is rather anti-climactic. Perhaps it's how the incumbent advantage turned out to be much greater than expected, just like in Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain where Strobele got 43% and his competitors, predicted to be breathing down his neck, had to make do with 21% and 18% respectively. Perhaps Thierse's competitors turned out to mostly undo each other. In any case Thierse won easily with 41%; Liebich got 21%, and Nooke and Schulz are left with only 15% and 13% respectively.

Two fewer former GDR dissidents in parliament. And both Christian-Democrats and Greens lose one of their already rare prominent East-Germans, which will please the Leftist Party no end I'm sure.

That on a perhaps melancholic sidenote on this otherwise pleasantly surprising evening: I was bracing myself for the opinion polls being too optimistic, and tonight being faced with a rightwing majority, and both Leftists and Greens doing subpar. None of that happened!

I have been reading this since yall got it going in earnest. I never felt smart enought to comment, but I appreciate what you have done, Walter and Thomas and Nimh.