German Elections 2009

First projections:

CDU/CSU: 33.4% (Second worst percentage ever)
SPD: 22.7% (Worst percentage ever)
FDP: 14.8% (Best percentage ever)
Linke: 12.5% (Best percentage ever)
Grüne: 10.6% (Best percentage ever)
Others: 6% (Highest percentage: Piraten, 2.1%)

Likely prognosis: Merkel will remain chancellor, but now with a CDU/CSU coalition (with Guido Westerwelle as vice chancellor) and more people on the streets.
 
Projections already ??  :huh:

I don't get it... Merkel she is aleready in coalition ? And: With 33.4% can someone gouvern in Germany ?

Quetzalcoatlus said:
[..] how pittyfull has become the once Mighty France : Having such a clown for President,
an admirer of Berlouskoni [...]
Click to expand...

Some days after this quote, the Clearstream case begun in French courts : Sarko brought ex vice president
in tribunal -what a shame  :(
Plus, Sarko has a judicial seekers like a president that he is, so this comedy is also highly unjuste....
 
Quetzalcoatlus said:
I don't get it... Merkel she is aleready in coalition ? And: With 33.4% can someone gouvern in Germany ?
Click to expand...

Eh?  :huh: As I described in the first post in this thread, the current government is made up of CDU/CSU and SPD. Now it looks like the coalition will change to CDU/CSU and FDP. Merkel is of the CDU, and will remain chancellor.
 
I wasn't aware....
Well, there is a good point in this : Now with this turn into the 'right' maybe people will appreciate
more the left side, and hopefully we'll see SPD on power after 4 years. Of course all SPD need is a leader to conduct
a clever opposition
 
Maybe. Or maybe the SPD will fall apart completely. Much can happen in four years. It will be a long, long winter.
 
Yes, but I'm happy to do it again:

CDU/CSU is conservative. (mid to mid-right)
SPD is social democrat. (mid to mid-left)
FDP is liberal. (mid)
Linke is leftist/socialist. (left to far left)
Grüne is green (mid-left to left).


As I mentioned, I'm a supporter of the Greens, and I am happy for their result, but devastated about the result of the SPD, because that was the party they would have made a coalition with. These will be the hardest years in German history in six decades.
 
I have the hope that socialism will rise again in Europe, wiser this time. It has to.
All it needs is the rise of a wave in France or Sweden, with Norway to remain socialist, the rest will follow  :)
Yet is a bit unlikely this to happen in France soon  :(

As I mentioned, I'm a supporter of the Greens
Click to expand...

Interesting! This can be the next wave in the years to come, instead of a second socialist wave.
 
Quetzalcoatlus said:
I have the hope that socialism will rise again in Europe, wiser this time. It has to.
Click to expand...

Dear God, no!  :blink: Socialism fell in Germany in 1989, and that was 40 years too late!
 
Oh, OK. That's called "social democracy" in Germany, to distinguish it from the "real existing socialism" the East Germans propagated.
 
I see!
Countries like France & Sweden have a deep tradition in social democracy, no matter who's in power.
And this is the most important; people to have a leftish coulture... What's happening in Germany?

How is the people there compared to other countries you've been? More leftish or more conservative?
 
There is a very strong leftist tradition in Germany. After the war, in the Federal Republic leftist sentiments were mostly carried and channeled by the social democrats (SPD), although a sort of "social democracy" was the very basis of the Federal Republic's constitution.
This first changed in the 1980s, when the Green party formed and took over much of the civil liberty ideas that the SPD lost in the Schmidt era. After reunification, the former governing party of East Germany, the SED, transformed into the PDS, and carried a much more radical socialist rhetoric. They were of little importance on federal level until the entire left wing left the SPD in 2005 and formed a new party, called the WASG; they later merged with the PDS to the new Linke (Leftist).
So there has always been a strong left wing in Germany, but until recently, it has always been carried by rather critical and intelligent theorists. With the new Linke party, this has changed. Now "Leftism" means promising the people blue skies, rainbows and pots of gold.
In all this misery, there is at least one bit of good news: There were also local elections in Schleswig-Holstein and Brandenburg today. In Brandenburg, the neo-nazi DVU party lost 5% and dropped out of the parliament, with a pathetic 1%.
 
In deed, a good new!!
Very interesting your analysis, especially for what it happened after the reunification.
 
Provisoric official results:

CDU/CSU: 33.8% (Second worst percentage ever)
SPD: 23.0% (Worst percentage ever)
FDP: 14.6% (Best percentage ever)
Linke: 11.9% (Best percentage ever)
Grüne: 10.7% (Best percentage ever)
Others: 6% (Highest percentage: Piraten, 2.0%)

Turnout was 70.8%, almost 7% less than in 2005, and the worst turnout ever.

The CDU/CSU-FDP coalition has a total of 48.4% and 332 seats in the Bundestag (308 is required for a majority).

The biggest winner of the elections is the FDP, gaining 4.8% compared to the 2005 elections. The biggest loser is the SPD, losing 11.2% from 2005.
 
What's the cutoff to receive seats, Per?  Like, what percentage of the vote does a party have to gain to get a seat?
 
A Bundestag candidate has to get the majority in a district. You have two votes: One goes directly to the state organisation of the party (e.g. SPD Berlin, CDU Northrhine-Westphalia etc.) and the other one to the candidate of your own district. Anybody can become a candidate and run for a seat in the Bundestag, but of course, most people run in the name of their party. The districts are roughly even by population, hence very uneven by geographic size. My district is a borough of Berlin with 310 000 people, so I think a district should have 200 000 to 300 000 people.

Every member of the Bundestag was voted there by his district, and in this election, chancellor candidate Steinmeier of the SPD narrowly won his and nearly had to carry the embarrassment of not having an own Bundestag seat (although that would not have had any consequences on potential government offices).

I don't remember an instance where a member of the Bundestag was not member of a party, but I do remember that in 1998 (or was it 2002?), two members of the PDS got Bundestag seats although the party itself did not get the 5% to gain an official fraction, hence the two were officially non-party members.
 
LooseCannon said:
What's the cutoff to receive seats, Per?  Like, what percentage of the vote does a party have to gain to get a seat?
Click to expand...

As a parallell, I can mention that in Norway, this cutoff limit is 4 percent of the overall votes. In Norway, the seats in the Storting are distributed across the 19 counties of the kingdom. 150 seats are distributed according to population of each county (the area also contributes to the distribution of seats, otherwise the northern county (Finnmark) would only have one seat). Then each county has one seat each, for which the parties need to make the cutoff limit to compete. The point of these 19 seats is to compensate for the obvious error one gets from rounding off when distributing the first 150.

Within each county, each party nominates a list of candidates - some smaller parties do not nominate candidates in all counties - and the seats are distributed according to the votes within that county. For these seats the cutoff limit does not apply, so a party that gets, say, 15 % of the votes in just one county will end up having a seat in the Storting despite having only about 1% of the total national votes. For example, the party "RED!" (a coalition of some small communist parties) nearly got seats in two counties, but had less than 1 % of the total votes. The so-called social liberalists (Venstre) obtained 3,9 % of the national votes, but only two seats. If they had made the cutoff, they would've had 8.
 
Perun said:
I don't remember an instance where a member of the Bundestag was not member of a party, but I do remember that in 1998 (or was it 2002?), two members of the PDS got Bundestag seats although the party itself did not get the 5% to gain an official fraction, hence the two were officially non-party members.
Click to expand...

What does the vote for the parties do then, just give them official status?
 
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