I'm putting any posts on the upcoming German snap elections on this existing thread, because it already contains basic explanations of local politics above. Today, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier officially dissolved the Bundestag following the failed vote of confidence for Chancellor Olaf Scholz on 16 December. Even before that, parties had agreed on elections to be held on 23rd February after the ruling "traffic light" coalition of center-left Social Democrats (SPD, party color red), progressive Greens and classically liberal Free Democrats (FDP, yellow) failed on 6 November. Everything after that was just constitutional formalities.

The breakup surprised me - though it had been coming for a year, after a ruling by the Constitutional Court that you cannot just re-allocate extra funds outside the regular national budget to another purpose to circumvent the constitutional debt cap brought the differences between the fiscally conservative FDP and the two bigger left-wing parties in the coalition to a head. Still, my expectation was that like so many squabbling coalition governments before, they would hold it together until the regular end of the term next fall. Not least because the members of the Bundestag tend to cling to their seats if uncertain of re-election under present circumstances; and one of the "traffic light" reforms was capping the size of parliament at 630 after it had ballooned in recent terms under previous election law.

While no SPD chancellor has ever made it to the regular end of a second term, this is actually the first time after WWII that a German government broke up in its first one. The Liberals had been particularly unhappy with their dwindling approval rates within the government, and most observers agree that FDP head and finance minister Christian Lindner had been trying to give cause for divorce with unacceptable demands to the other partners for months. He was allegedly still surprised when Chancellor Scholz took the initiative and fired him on 6 November. There was some partisan debate on whose "fault" the breakup was, with leftwingers seizing on a "D-Day" paper containing a detailed plan for the split emerging from the FDP afterwards.

But in the end most everyone was just glad that the mismatched coalition with all its infighting in the most unpopular government of recent, if not all, times, had come to an end and there was the chance for a fresh start with all the looming crises. Developments are pretty well-told with the auto-updating aggregate poll depiction from Wikipedia:



The Greens were early winners in the competition for popular approval among the three coalition partners at the expense of the other two. Part of that was probably the sympathetic relatable public persona of Green vice chancellor and minister of the economy Robert Habeck, and that climate protection was a dominating topic in political discourse at the time. Of course public opinion soured on that when climate activists went to action forms felt to be disproportionate, like glueing themselves to streets blocking everday traffic; and sympathy for Habeck also took a hit after a badly-written and -communicated draft mandate for new environmentally friendly private heating, and a squishy stance on extending operation of the last three nuclear power plants when energy prices spiked after the outbreak of the Ukraine war and stop of Russian natural gas deliveries.

At that point the Greens went into a tailspin, with the right-wing AfD profiting most. Under previous governments, it used to be that Greens and AfD rose and fell largely in unison, as they represent pretty much the poles in the contemporary political spectrum; the more polarized debate became, the better those poles did. With the entry of the Greens into government, the mechanism of government vs. opposition worked against them and for the AfD though. The latter seized on dissatisfaction across the board, from domestic progressive politics to immigration to demanding "peace with Russia" and bringing back cheap Russian gas imports to get energy prices down and improve the ailing economy.

By early 2024 they had pretty much exploited their voter potential in polls with up to 24 percent; then their strategy of ever more radical statements to get attention backfired. A lot of that was a rather exaggerated investigative report about a "clandestine" meeting of some AfD members and other rightwingers at a Potsdam lakeside which discussed "re-migrating" immigrants - allegedly including German citizens - which was pretty much billed as "Wannsee Conference 2.0". There were more substantial affairs, too, like around the guy they made top candidate for the EU Parliament elections despite warnings from within the party about his pro-Chinese sympathies etc., then promptly had an aide of his arrested as as Chinese spy, gave an interview to an Italian newspaper saying he would never broadbrush SS members as criminals, and similar.

That resulted in a public backlash both in Germany and among fellow European rightwingers, with Marine Le Pen having them thrown out of the common group in the EU parliament, and costing them a third of their polling support. Much of that was snapped up by the emerging Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) which is pursueing much of the same anti-progressive politics, but under a nominal left-wing banner. Their recent successes in East German state elections have been chronicled upthread, and by now they are in a coalition government with the Social Democrats in Brandenburg, and with both the latter and the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) in Thuringia, while an attempt at the same in Saxony failed over the previously noted disagreements on non-state issues like support for Ukraine and the basing of US medium-range missiles in West Germany.

Quarreling over that both with other and within the own party have since cost them some voter sympathy. Thuringia was a particularly egregious example, with the national leadership around founder Sahra Wagenknecht telling the local chapter that their negotiating results were not good enough, and even admitting new party members promoting the national line to the state chapter over the local's heads. Such centralism also caused problems in Hamburg, where two competing BSW chapters now exist - one established locally by party rebels, and one installed by national leadership. A similar situation has cost the AfD admission to elections in Bremen before, after infighting resulted in two competing lists of candidates being filed with the local election board.

Anyway, with campaigning now having gone on for weeks in all but name even before the election date became official today, we're seeing the typical effect of poll numbers on a converging path. AfD and SPD have been recovering, and so have the Greens and BSW more recently. Meanwhile CDU/CSU remain firmly in lead, and it is generally being expected that their candidate Friedrich Merz will be the next chancellor; though which partner he will chose for a coalition that will almost certainly become necessary again remains to be seen. Realistic pretenders are SPD and Greens, both of which are however tainted to conservative Christian Democrats by their association with the outgoing government. If given the choice, they would definitely prefer the traditional partnership with the Liberals. But it's not sure those will even make the five-percent threshold to enter parliament again, much less provide enough seats for a majority.

To Americans, there might be slight memories of their own recent campaigns: a center-left incumbent who even some in his own party doubt will make it again, and suggested they go with another candidate - namely defense minister Boris Pistorius, currently Germany's most popular politician, who however declined after a couple days of meaningful silence; and a challenger who is prone to statements of an endearing mix between machismo and megalomania, like "I'll give Putin 24 hours to stop the war in Ukraine, else I'll supply Taurus cruise missiles to the latter and allow them to be fired into Russia" in a recent interview (then later denying he gave Putin an ultimatum).

In fact none of the four candidates named by parties with any chances - Olaf Scholz for the SPD, Friedrich Merz for CDU/CSU, Robert Habeck for the Greens and Alice Weidel for the AfD - are particularly popular, all stuck in a cluster of 22 to 28 percent of public approval. Realistically, the race is going to be between Scholz and Merz, and while the latter's party leads, he has acknowledged that Scholz' SPD may jump back to the 20s during the campaign. After all, the previous election was supposed to be decided between CDU and Greens; but then both candidates messed up their campaigns, and Scholz emerged as the winning third. Plus as always in the fragmented multi-party system of today, victory will ultimately go to the one who manages to build a coalition with a Bundestag majority.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BansheeOne,

I find it interesting to see some of the complexities the rest of the world goes through over governance.
A look at history, much of it relatively recent, shows how complex these things are when you have to consider the consequences.
Here in the US, we’ve been living in relatively safe places. We have large oceans on both sides that provide existential protection, and no truly dangerous neighbors.
We’re mostly protected by geography from our own poor decisions.

^^^^^

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:
Still, my expectation was that like so many squabbling coalition governments before, they would hold it together until the regular end of the term next fall. Not least because the members of the Bundestag tend to cling to their seats if uncertain of re-election under present circumstances; and one of the "traffic light" reforms was capping the size of parliament at 630 after it had ballooned in recent terms under previous election law.

Expansion on that. First projection of the year for district results by election.de, 50 days ahead of the elections. Mind that this has no direct relation to the eventual make-up of the Bundestag, as under the German two-votes-system it's actually the "secondary" vote for party lists, not the "primary" one for district candidates, which decides seat distribution. The basic principle is that the "secondary" votes are counted at state level to see how many seats of the total each party in each state gets. Candidates who win a plurality in their district on "primary" vote are assigned theirs first. The balance of seats is filled with candidates from the respective party's state list who haven't won a district directly, in descending order.



By law, the Bundestag has twice as many seats as there are districts, so in theory half of them are filled with directly-elected candidates, the rest with list candidates, so that the distribution ultimately represents the popular vote. This worked very well in old West Germany with two big and one, later two, smaller parties. CDU/CSU and SPD decided the district races between themselves, while the liberal FDP and later the Greens also had a shot at representation as long as they cleared the national five-percent threshold in the popular vote. The only quirk that might occurr was a party winning more districts in a state directly than seats provided for them by the secondary vote, leading to "overhang mandates". Unlike in some state parliaments, those extra seats were not balanced by additional ones for other parties to maintain distribution by popular vote.

With a fifth (post-communist) party in united Germany and the two big ones less clear ahead in the popular vote, this quirk became more regular and bigger to the point is really skewed election results. This particularly benefited the center-right CDU/CSU; in 2009, they gained 24 extra seats over the regular total of 598. After that, balancing seats were introduced, which however made the size of parliament balloon. In 2013, there were 29 additional seats to balance four overhang mandates for CDU/CSU. With the emergence of a sixth party (AfD), the effect accelerated; in 2017 there were 46 overhang and 65 balancing seats, in 2021 34 and 104 respectively, bringing total size to 735.

Everyone agreed something should be done against that, but obviously not to the detriment of their party. CDU/CSU, due to their structural benefit from overhang mandates, mostly wanted to cap the number of balancing seats. In the end, the current SPD-Green-FDP coalition decided for a slight increase of districts and regular seat number (now 630 instead of 598) while controversally abolishing overhang mandates completely. IOW, if a party now wins more districts in a state directly than provided for them by the secondary vote, the candidates with the lowest pluralities are SOL if they're not entering parliament via the state list. At which point you can of course ask why not to go to a straight single-vote system.

Obviously the opposition complained to the Constitutional Court, which however upheld this new rule. OTOH, it struck down another which would have done away with the exemption that a party which wins at least three districts directly nationally will enter parliament with all the seats provided to them by the secondary vote, even if they miss the five-percent threshold. The complainants here were an unusual alliance of the Bavarian conservative CSU, which runs only in that state and may not always make the national threshold, though they typically win all the districts in Bavaria directly; and the ailing Left Party, which can still hope to win three districts in East Berlin and Leipzig.

The election.de district map shows the 22 direct mandates which will likely pull the short straw under the new law by current projections as red dots: 11 of the CDU, nine for the AfD, and two for the Left - the latter because the party is currently projected to win just those two, thus not triggering the exemption while polling consistently below the five-percent threshold. Under the old law, they would have gotten at least those two seats, and I wonder if the Constitutional Court considered this particular case in its ruling, where a party is not represented in the Bundestag though two of their candidates were directly elected. Of course with seven weeks to go, we're still dealing in hypotheticals here, but it might very well happen, possibly resulting in a new complaint.

Has Hamberg/Bremen-area always been a SPD or, far-left stronghold?

I’m honestly surprised that AfD wasn’t banned yet ahead of the elections.

Very interesting to see on that map how the popularity of that party breaks out roughly to the old East Germany!

quote:

Originally posted by corsair:
Has Hamberg/Bremen-area always been a SPD or, far-left stronghold?

I have lived in that area on and off over 40 years and all I can say is yes.

Generally, the principle that cities tend to be more left-wing and rural areas more conservative applies. The city and state of Bremen has consistently been ruled by Social Democrats since WW II, currently in a coalition with the Greens and the Left Party, the last state government the latter remains part of. Hamburg has had four CDU mayors out of 15, (West) Berlin six out of 17 (currently in a grand coalition with the SPD). Even Munich, in the middle of consistently CSU-ruled Bavaria, has had just two conservative mayors out of eight.

For the strength of the AfD in East Germany, see some of the earlier posts how they succeeded the Left Party as the party of Eastern identity by playing on anti-Western feelings remaining from the reunification process when the incompetitive socialist economy crashed, warm and fuzzy memories of social security and orderly secluded life in the little fenced-in DDR, etc. At the same time, this concentration with the attendant anti-capitalist, pro-Russian/Chinese etc. leanings pretty much locks their paths to power into a region with just 20 percent of the German population. If you read the comments section of the pro-AfD weekly "Junge Freiheit" (not to be confused with the orthodox Marxist "Junge Welt", though they frequently align in their takes), you'll find remaining conservative sympathizers complaining frequently about just that.

There has been talk of trying to ban the party by mostly the usual suspects for years, but this would be a drawn-out high-stakes process before the Constitutional Court. It has been done successfully only twice: in 1952 against the Socialist Reich Party which was basically a successor organisation of the NSDAP, and in 1956 against the Communist Party. In 2001 it was tried against the neo-Nazi National Democrat Party, but failed twice. In 2003 the Constitutional Court abated the first trial due to the usual dilemma that government informers providing evidence might themselves influence the anti-constitutional direction of the party. So those informers were cut off and another attempt made in 2013. In 2017 the court ruled that the party was clearly aiming to overthrow the constitutional order, but by now was so weakened that it had no realistic chance for it, and thus a ban would be disproportionate.

That added an additional burden of proof, making future bans harder, though with anti-constitutionality established as such, the NPD could be deprived of public funding. E. g., under German law any party admitted to run in state, national or European elections gets an annual campaign cost refund of 1.05 Euro per vote cast for them, 0.86 for votes after the first four million. The government also adds 45 cent to every Euro gained from membership fees and donations up to 3,300 Euro per natural person; the total of public funds may not exceed a party's self-generated intake. The intention is to reduce dependence upon and influence of special interests, and level the playing field somewhat for smaller parties.

Anyway, the argument could probably be made that the AfD with its current public influence and foreign support in fact has a realistic chance of overthrowing the system if that was established to be their aim by the Constitutional Court. But that is by no means a given, and in any case would take years to arrive at, with all the usual arguments against trying: proceedings would give them added martyr status with sympathizers, the court possibly ruling for them would be a huge win for them, and in the end you can ban parties, but not opinions - voters will go somewhere else, like the nominally left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance which promotes much the same politics.

There is a motion by a multi-party group of 113 Bundestag members from November that parliament should initiate a banning process, but it's currently unclear if it will even proceed to voting before the elections. Even then you'd be lucky if the Constitutional Court ruled on the case before the next. In the meantime, the AfD may be good for about 20 percent at the upcoming polls, plus-minus four or so. Which will be really annoying for coalition-making among centrists, particularly if the Wagenknecht crew gets another ten plus-minus. But while up to a third of voters going to the ends of the horseshoe is a definite warning sign, it's not yet the end of the Republic.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BansheeOne,

quote:

Originally posted by BansheeOne:
Anyway, with campaigning now having gone on for weeks in all but name even before the election date became official today, we're seeing the typical effect of poll numbers on a converging path. AfD and SPD have been recovering, and so have the Greens and BSW more recently. Meanwhile CDU/CSU remain firmly in lead, and it is generally being expected that their candidate Friedrich Merz will be the next chancellor; though which partner he will chose for a coalition that will almost certainly become necessary again remains to be seen.

First party conventions are now through. Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the SPD and Alice Weidel of the AfD were confirmed as candidates bei theirs this weekend. The Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance is holding theirs today, and Liberals and Left Party are still to follow - but their prospects of even entering the Bundestag are iffy, and they won't name a dedicated candidate for the chancellorship. CDU also still to confirm their candidate Friedrich Merz, but no surprises expected. With a near-full deck of surveys from major pollsters for the new year (see auto-updated Wiki aggregate at the top of the page), the previous trend is mostly confirmed: Leading CDU/CSU giving in some, AfD and Greens once more rising in unison as the poles in polical debate like before the current government. Though the SPD seems stuck around an average of 16 percent.

More interestingly, Sahra Wagenknecht's BSW is perilously dropping towards the five-percent threshold despite their recent grand successes in East German state elections. The quarreling around those is probably partly to blame: Both people expecting them to get shit done in state governments rather than arguing about Ukraine and US medium-range-missiles in West Germany, and those who wanted a more ideological pure approach to those issue, were probably disappointed by the real-world compromises they eventually took, and the infighting surrounding those. The young party also remains beset by internal dissent about the centralization of leadership. Most notable in the previously-mentioned case of Hamburg with competing state chapters, repeats of local conventions with party rebels being banned, etc.

There may also be a self-reinforcing effect: People who jumped the horseshoe gap from AfD to BSW now judging the latter's chances doubtful, and jumping back to the original so as not to potentially waste their vote. At any rate, even though a big part of the AfD's rising numbers are from particularly benevolent reports by pollsters INSA and Yougov who are notoriously fringe-friendly due to their internet-based fieldwork, national public broadcaster ZDF's in-house pollster FGW also had them at 21 this week; and I trust them most due to their conservative methodology and track record. So it's quite possible the AfD will get back to their all-time high of 24 come the elections, while their nominally left-wing mirror of the BSW falters. Which if nothing else would make coalition-making among centrists in a likely four-party parliament easier.

As for campaign topics, the economy and immigration remain the leading issues in public opinion, with slight changes of which one's actually on top over time and between surveys. In the end you might say campaigns are always over the economy, so that's a no-brainer; as soon as the current government failed, the topic moved ahead of immigration to 34 percent of most-mentioned issues in both FGW's surveys and those of their fellow public broadcaster ARD's pollster Infratest. The latter currently has immigration slightly ahead again at 37, while FGW still reports 31; likely a current effect from media reports on the usual excesses in New Year celebrations focussed on heavily immigrant parts of big cities. Though the half-dozen actual deaths from reckless handling of illegal fireworks were mostly among middle-aged smalltowners, sparking the annual fruitless debate on banning private fireworks completely.

Other issues are further down the scale and vary in precedence between surveys, largely depending upon what's all lumped into one point: Infratest reports war/peace/foreign politics at 14 percent, while FGW has war/Ukraine/Russia at five; conversely, FGW has energy/climate at 18, while Infratest has environment/climate change at 13. Cost/wages/prices is 11 with FGW, inflation seven with Infratest, but the latter separately reports social injustice/poverty/basic welfare at eleven while FGW has the "social gradient" at six. More single-digit issues are education, domestic security/crime/terrorism, pensions, healthcare, right-wingers, and general political disenchantment. Sometime in the next weeks I'll take these as an excuse to detail the state of German defense politics since it's what matters most to me, but no time right now.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BansheeOne,