Germany: SPD faces crushing defeat

Walter, do you, or the local press, attribute any of the apparent erosion of Schroder's support to his stance re: The US, or is it purely domestic concerns?

Further, I'd be interested in your appraisal of the overall effect on the German Political Scene of the sentiments of your newly enfranchised former East German voters ... I would imagine them likely to have strong feelings for the more socialist domestic issues and positions, particularly those of direct economic impact.



timber

These two state elections are in states, which have been "West Germany".

Since 80% of Germans regarding the latest polls are against a war, this is no theme - could be 'deadly' for any party to be 'pro', especially, since both churches are strongly against a war (the main clientele of the conservatives).

Federal issues have been the dominant themes in pre-electiuon times in both states: taxes, money, work, money, education, money, well and money of course.


"newly enfranchised former East German voters" - it's 13 years ago, since Germany was re-united!

Even our conservatives follow an economic policy, which is called by US-Americans as "socialist": 'social market economy' - an "invention" of the conservatives.
Social Democrates are still in some state governments (besides in the Federal government) - I don't see much differences between new and old states at all in this matter.

(The only difference is that in the old states the PDS, which is the follower-up party to the GDR 'SED' (communists), gets about 20% to less than 2% in the old states.)

The actual results (should be very close to the official final ones by now):

Lower Saxony:

SPD 33.7%
CDU 47.7%
FDP 7.6%
Grüne 8.5%



Hesse

CDU 48.9%
SPD 29.3%
Grüne 10.0%
FDP 7.9%

Thanks for the clarification, Walter. I rather suspected the issue was more of purely domestic concern to Schroder, but I'm abysmaly unfamiliar with German Politics. I know a lot more about German Beer and German Automotive Product than I do about the folks who live there and make the stuff.

How do you feel this will impact Schroder's Domestic Policy? Is it a serious blow to his power base, or a mere indicator of public sentiment, with little or no immediate effect on Schroder's ability to successfully prosecute his agenda?



timber

Walter - can you (maybe after you've had some sleep) give us a quick rundown on the difference between the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats?

timber

There'll be some consequences in Berlin both in government and party (the latter just my suppose):
While Chancellor Schröder's SPD-Green Party coalition has a majority in the Bundestag (lower chamber), the opposition may have increased its power in the country's other chamber of parliament, the Bundesrat, by winning in Lower Saxony. The CDU's additional six seats there would make it more difficult for Chancellor Schröder to pursue his policies. He will likely be forced to make more compromises to sway votes his way.
Currently the CDU holds 35 of the 69 mandates in the Bundestag.

Did I tell you that the second but largest German brewery (Warsteiner) is just 15 miles away from my place, a small one only 2 miles, another one 10 ... .
And that 2/3 of Xenon headlamps (worldwide production) are produced by a firm from here (Hella)?

ehBeth

In short:

Christian Democrats (and their Bavarian 'sister', the Christian Socialists) are conservatives, the Social Democrtas are Liberals.

In political reality, the CDU/CSU has policy lines comparable to the US Liberals, the SPD would .... commie-like in most of US' citizen's opinion. (On the opposite, some Republicans follow political ideas, which are outside our basic law.)

Longer (from britannica com and other sources):

SPD, Social Democratic Party:
German: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands.
German political party that calls forgovernment control or regulation of large industry; it is Germany's oldest and largest single party.

The SPD was formed by the merger of the General German Workers' Union of Ferdinand Lassalle and the Social Democratic Workers' Party of the Marxists August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The merger took place in Gotha in 1875 and resulted in the Socialist Workers' Party, which after 1890 was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Although the party was banned in 1878 by the Prussian government of Otto von Bismarck, the party flourished, even helping to found the Second International in 1889. When legalized in 1890, it received 19.7 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections; this grew to 34.8 percent of the vote and 110 of the 397 Reichstag seats in 1912. But its vote in favour of war credits in 1914 and the disaster ofWorld War I led the party to split, the centrists under Karl Kautsky forming the Independent Social Democratic Party and the left under Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht forming the Spartacus League, which in December 1918 became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

The right wing of the SPD under Friedrich Ebert joined with liberals and conservatives to crush the Soviet-style uprisings in Germany in 1918-20. In the 1919 elections the SPD received 37.9 percent of the vote (while the Independent Social Democrats received another 7.6 percent), but the party's failure to win favourable terms from the Allies at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (terms embodied in the Treaty of Versailles) and the country's severe economic problems led to a drop in support. Even after reuniting with the Independents, the Social Democrats in 1924 secured only 20.5 percent of the vote. Although the party recovered some ground, the Great Depression caused them to lose it again to the Nazi Party on the right and the communists on the left. By 1933 it held only 120 of 647 seats in the Reichstag to the Nazis' 288 and the Communists' 81.

Outlawed by the Nazis in 1933, the SPD revived after World War II. In West Germany its vote steadily rose from 1953 (28.8 percent) to 1972 (45.9 percent). The SPD joined a coalition government with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1966 and then in 1969 became senior partners in a coalition government with the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The SPD-FDP coalition governed until 1982, when the FDP broke away and formed a new government with the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the ChristianSocial Union. The party remained out of power at the national level until 1998, when it was able to form a coalition government with the Green Party.



CDU, Christian Democratic Party
German: Christlich-Demokratische Union
German political party advocating regulated economic competition and close cooperation with the United States in foreign policy. It held power in the Federal Republic of Germany from the establishment of the West German republic in 1949 until 1969 and again from 1982 until 1998. It oversaw the reunification of Germany in 1990.

At the end of World War II, Christian Democratic parties began to win elections in the occupied zones of Germany, though the CDU did not coalesce into a national party until1950. A coalition between the CDU and Bavaria's Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union; CSU) won West Germany's first election in August 1949, and the CDU leader Konrad Adenauer became the republic's first chancellor. The CDU-CSU coalition and Adenauer, credited with West Germany's rapid economic recovery, won a near majority in 1953 and a majority in 1957.

In the 1960s the issues of German alignment with Great Britain or France in the European Economic Community, of a West German détente with eastern Europe, and of the appropriate way to discourage rising right-wing sentiment led to disagreement inthe CDU-CSU coalition. After the provincial elections of 1966, when the Free Democratic Party (Freie Demokratische Partei; FDP) abandoned its alliance with the CDU-CSU, the CDU-CSU formed a short-lived "grand coalition" with its chief rival, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD). After the election of 1969, the SPD formed a parliamentary coalition with the FDP and maintained parliamentary control for the next 13 years. The CDU-CSU, an opposition party for the first time in its history, remained out of power until 1982, when the FDP abandoned its coalition with the SPD and formed a government with the CDU and CSU under CDU leader Helmut Kohl. This coalition, with Kohl as chancellor, presided over the unification of West and East Germany, which was formalized on October 3, 1990. Further strengthened by support from former East German parties, theCDU-CSU coalition won united Germany's first legislative elections on December 2, 1990. In the following years the CDU-led coalition faced public discontent over the economic burden of reunification, but the coalition retained power in the elections of 1994 with a reduced majority. The coalition was defeated and replaced by an alliance of Social Democrats and Greens in the elections of 1998. The following year the CDU suffered a series of scandals caused by unreported election contributions, forcing Kohland his successor Wolfgang Schäuble to resign their leadership positions. Schäuble subsequently was replaced as party leader by Angela Merkel, the first woman and first eastern German to lead a major German political party since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949.


CSU, Christian Social Union
German Christlich-Soziale Union
Conservative German political party that was founded in Bavaria (Bayern), West Germany, in 1946 by various Roman Catholic and Protestant groups and committed to free enterprise, federalism, and a united Europe that would operate under Christian principles.

From 1946 the CSU has held the government of Bavaria continuously with only one exception, in 1954-57, though it was forced to form coalition governments with minor parties until it achieved an absolute majority in 1962. Nationally it has cooperated closely with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which operates in all the German states except Bavaria. The CSU was led from 1961 to 1988 by Franz Josef Strauss, a member of the Bundestag from 1949 and a frequent federal minister in CDU-CSU federal governments, notably minister of defense in 1956-62 and of finance in 1966-69. In the 1980 elections Strauss was the CDU-CSU candidate for chancellor, and the CDU-CSU defeat was a heavy blow to him.

During the 1990s the party adopted a more skeptical approach to European economic and monetary integration than the CDU, arguing against the adoption of a single European currency. From 1999 the party was led by Edmund Stoiber, who also served as head of the Bavarian government and was the CDU/CSU candidate for chancellor.



FDP, Free Democratic Party

German Freie Demokratische ParteiGerman centrist political party that advocates individualism and free economic competition. Although it has a relatively small following, it has often made and broken governments by forming coalitions with larger parties.

Delegates from liberal parties in the American, British, and French zones of occupation formed the FDP in December 1948. In the West Germany of the early 1950s, the FDP took part in the coalition government of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It left the coalition in 1956 to join with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an opposition party. After the national elections in 1961, when the CDU and its coalition partner, the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (CSU), lost their absolute majority, the FDP exacted the promise of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's resignation as the price of its cooperation in a new coalition. The FDP's disillusionment with the policies of the new chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, motivated the party's second withdrawal from its coalition with the Christian Democrats in November 1966. After national elections in 1969, the FDP joined forces with the SPD to overcome the CDU-CSU plurality in the national assembly and elect the SPD leader Willy Brandt chancellor. The FDP remained in coalition with the SPD until 1982, when it formed a coalition government with the Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union. It remained in coalition with the CDU-CSU until 1998, when the government was replaced by a coalition of the SPD and the Green Party.

soooooo, the CDU is the more conservative of the 2 - but would be considered liberal to U.S. eyes?

is that sort of the bottom line?

ehBeth

A quotation from "My favourite website"
A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States :

"The American parties are located to the right of their German counterparts. Former President Clinton for instance, a democrat, would have to be placed at the right wing of the German conservative party CDU. Some people at the right end of the American republican party are so radical that they would probably be under surveillance in Germany. There is no social democratic party in the US."

Depends on the issue, though, I would say. Economically, all of German politics would be to the left to all of US politics, I guess. But on non-materialist issues the CDU and especially its Bavarian sisterparty the CSU are no liberals (though I find it hard to estimate whether they would correspond to actual Republicans or more to the Tipper Gore-type centrist Democrats).

When it comes to immigration and citizenship issues, I think Bush Jr is probably a lot more liberal than either of the two main German parties!

Perhaps you've hit on something there, nimh. The centrists, regardless of party, may be the real problem


timber

Considering that up to some years, no-one thought, Germany was an immigration country at all, the immigration law proposals by the SPD (especially forced by the Greens) are an advantage.

In citizenship, however, I do think opposite to your opinion that e.g. dual-nationality here is more liberal than in the USA.

In the US, if you're born there, you're automatically a US citizen, right? This - and I'm probably going to butcher the Latin now - ius solis rather than the ius sanguinis of citizenship based on origin ('blood') has been a taboo concept in German politics for decades, I believe - sharply delineating the German model of citizenship from the French one (in this the Dutch took after the French). And the CDU/CSU I believe still resist its adoption into German law.

As for immigration, as a European I can only sigh a little jealously at a president Bush, in election campaign times, applauding the immigrants' efforts and contribution to the US and insisting on the need for further immigration. To express the country's need for continuing immigration would be political suicide in Holland and I don't see the German CDU/CSU ("Kinder statt Inder") repeat it either.