German elections

By
Ben Raue
-
22

I plan on covering the German federal election, but I haven’t had a chance to consider the state elections happening in Germany before that. Luckily Charles in Germany has posted this comment on the blog yesterday, and I’ll post it here as a new thread:

Hi Ben, I don’t know if you know, or whether your such a psephoholic that you’d be interested, but before the German Federal elections on September 27th there are 2 German states going to the polls on the 30th August, namely Thüringia and Saxony.

I can’t comment much about the state of Saxony, but livingin Thüringia I’ve tried to garner a much information as I can concerning the up-coming poll. The CDU are the incombents in Thuringia with 45 seats in an 88 seat parliament. The newly named “Die Linke”, ie The Left which I’m told are the leftover of the Communist party here in East Germany currently have 28 seats, and the SPD have 15 seats. Politicians are elected by a complex amalgamation of 1st past-the-post and proportional representation (I’m told), whereby if a party gets 5% of the vote they automatically are entitled to at least 6 seats.

The current mister-president is CDU man Dieter Althaus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Althaus). He came under some criticism recently when skiing in Autria where he was responsible for the death of a woman, I think becasue he was travelling cross-piste. As he was badly injued himself in the accident, and proclaims to have no memory of it, he refused to apologise, which the opposition here were very critical of.

Of greater interest to you all though is the local Green party. At the last election they fell just short of getting enough votes for representation at 4.5%, but have improved somewhat now with polls consistently giving them 6% or more. Their webpage is:

http://www.sommergruen.de/

What’s also interesting is that in polls the CDU have fallen to 43%, which would mean they will no longer be able to govern Thüringia in their own right. The next biggest party are Die Linke, who until a couple of days ago, the SPD swore they would never form government with. Then I heard (and all this is second hand because my Deutsch is crap) that the SPD are willing to go into coalition with Die Linke, but only if the minister-president position goes to an SPD person – to which Die Linke have said ok!

Info on German elections can be seen in English here:

http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/en/index.html

For Thüringia results should appear here:

http://www.wahlen.thueringen.de/wahlseite.asp

the Thuringian site also has a very good breakdown of voting in the area for the recent European election.

Only for the real psephoholics though…

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22 COMMENTS

  1. As Ben has posted Charles’ comment, those interested in this might also be interested in the message I posted after (and equally off-topic!!). The German site I mention has (in German) news and info, so anyone with a good translator (or is a German speaker) can have a read:

    There is also a Land election in Saarland on the 30th so thats 3 states… For a more general breakdown, and for German opinion polls I go to: http://www.election.de/cgi-bin/news1.pl – you can see on the “Umfragen” page the polls for each of the states (which generally show an improvement for the Greens over their last results). You’ll notice as well that there’s also the Brandenburg and Schleswig-Holstein Land elections on the 27th of Sept, so a veritable feast of German elections.

  3. I like the way that site will calculate how many seats (mandates) each party will get based on the most recent polls too!

  4. In another piece of local news, racism has raised it’s ugly head, with the neo-nazi NPD telling the CDU to send an Angolan born member of their party “home”. The CDU, in a typically cowardly right-wing response, took down all their all campaign posters in which this Angolan born person is depicted, saying they are doing so as part of a wider campaign plan, and not because he is black – which is obviously nonsense. Campaigns are too expensive to be simply taking down posters everywhere and replacing them on a whim. It’s clear they don’t want to alienate a large portion of the electorate who share these racist views and unfortunately here in the East it is a large portion of the electorate.

    There’s an english article about it here:

    http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20090813-21227.html

  5. Interesting stuff from the NPD & CDU. I’m wondering if Cem Ozdemir (co-leader of the Greens) makes an appearance in the campaign, with the last party conference (that elected him as co-leader) being in Erfut in Thuringia!

  7. First of all, really good comments from Charles regarding the elections in Thüringia. Just a very little correction, because it has played a major role in the election campaigns: Basically, the opposition accuses Dieter Althaus not of not having apologised for the accident which occured in January. In fact he accepted his legal and personal accountability. The allegation is rather that he first asked his political opponents not to mention the accident in their campaigns (which the other parties accepted), but later gave an interview on the occassion of which he talked about the incident at length (e.g. the personal consequences it had for him) and thus himself raised the issue again.

  8. Thanks for clearing that up Sebastian. I have to admit my local source of information can struggle with explanations in English, and I can interpret things the wrong way. My source is also very anti CDU so there is a degree of bias there too.

  10. Charles in Germany
    [Politicians are elected by a complex amalgamation of 1st past-the-post and proportional representation (I’m told), whereby if a party gets 5% of the vote they automatically are entitled to at least 6 seats.]
    My German isn’t much good either and I’m wondering if this hybrid voting method is adjusted after the vote to achieve accurate proportional representation in the final numbers of each party in the house. Can anyone help with that?

  11. 10

    Yes that is the way the German system works but it is more complicated because it is done on a state by state basis. New Zealand has a simpler version. The name for it is Mixed Member Proportional (MMP).

  12. I’m no doubt talking to myself at the moment because you’re all asleep back home, but with 52% counted here in Thuringia the Greens are just sitting above the threshold for representation with 5.5%. When I first logged in with only 43% counted they were only on 5.03% . So hopefully the larger city booths are coming in later with an increased Green vote.

    The CDU and FDP will definately not get enough votes to form their own majority, and it’s borderline as to whether there could be a SPD-Die Linke majority. It is still possible then that there could be a SPD-Linke-Green coalition, but with German party permutations anything seems possible. The racist NDP seem to have fallen short of representation at this stage with only 4.6%.

    Stewart J – I did see a poster here in Jena with Cem Ozdemir’s face on saying he was coming to town last week to play some football! On Friday the leader of the SPD and Vice-chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeyer was here campaigning along with his large retinue of sun-glassed security too.

  13. Nearly all booths are reporting now and the Greens are comfortable on 6.2% which should deliver them 6 seats in the Thuringen parliament. Die Linke and the SPD together have 45 seats if they wanted to form a coalition in the 88 seat house – a majority of 1 (though I’m not sure if one of those needs to be a speaker or not). The CDU and the SPD could also form a coalition, but how desirable either party finds that idea remains to be seen. Resutls here:

    http://www.wahlen.thueringen.de/wahlseite.asp

    In the 51 seat Saarland parliament preliminary results have CDU 19 seats, SPD 13, Linke 11, FDP 5 and Greens 3.

    In Sachsen (Saxony) of the 120 seats the CDU are projected to get 53, Die Linke 27, SPD 13, NDP 7, FDP 13, and the Greens 7.

  15. I’ve just seen the first Pirate Party campaign posters put up here today. I wonder how much they’ll end up eating into the Green vote…

  17. Charles wrote: “Politicians are elected by a complex amalgamation of 1st past-the-post and proportional representation (I’m told), whereby if a party gets 5% of the vote they automatically are entitled to at least 6 seats.”

    No, a party does not automatically get 6 seats if they get over 5 %. With 5 % they might get es few as 4 seats out of 88 (0.05 * 88 = 4,4).

    Actually the system is not that comlicated. Each voter has two votes. One for the single member district and one country-wide closed party list. In each of the 44 single member districts the candidate with the highest number of votes wins (first past the post). But the total number of seats for a party depends on their list votes. Seats are distributes among parties with a list vote of more than 5 %. Smaller parties are ignored. For the distribution of list votes the highest remainder method (Hare/Niemeyer) is used.

    If a party wins more districts than they would win seats according to their share of list votes, they keep those seats won in the districts (overhang seats) but the other parties get compensatory seats so that the relation of seat shares corresponds to the vote shares.

  18. Martin – interestingly, this means that the parliament can be bigger or smaller from election to election, so there is no actual fixed upper limit on seats (one would assume the lower limit is the actual proportionality).

  19. So does anyone know if the party(ies) that form government here have to choose the equivalent of a Speaker from their number?

  21. @Stewart J,

    yes, the size of the parliament can vary from election to election. In Thuringia there is no upper limit for the number of seats.

    However in Saxony there is an upper limit – and it was applied this time. The number compensatory seats may not be greater than the number of overhang seats. For this reason the SPD in Saxony got only 14 seats instead of 15.

  22. Well, having just been in Berlin & Potsdam (however briefly) I did get to notice the number of election posters up – lots of the Pirate Party! In Potsdam (which is in Brandenburg) there were lots of PDS posters, with an almost equal number of SPD posters. Greens were far fewer, and in only slightly more prominence than the Pirates, but the FDP had a lots of double-sized posters of their andidate. One thing I noticed was that the SPD, CDU & FDP stuck to candidate photos, but the PDS and Greens ran more issue based items, the Greens seeming to rely more heavily on this. The Pirates poster consists of an image of the ballot paper and asks for 2nd votes (presumably because they have few or no constituency seat candidates). Unfortunately I missed th discussion at the Conference on the elections because my own presentation clashed directly with it (damn!), so I didn’t get much from the collective wisdom of the political science field, but their you go. Berlin was interesting as there also appeared to be billboard sized posters put up in dual carriage ways – and that the posters were all at an easily reachable height. If this had been Sydney they would all have been ripped down, but I saw remarkably few defaced or broken posters and most were left in place were they were (I was in Potsdam for 4 days so kept walking past the same ones each day). They were also paper-on-hardbard, not plastic as in Australia, so maybe the enviro conscious Germans have a lead on the Aussies?!?

    Currently here in England they are discussing the “Conference Season” and the LDP Conference just started. The big deal is cutting GBP50m from the budget, but what they pick seems like easy stuff. Reminds me of the early days of the Hawke Govt, with mostly easy stuff being done.

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