Maybe this thread will get too 1000 comments!
Deutschland thread, Deutschland thread
Every morning you greet me
Small and white, clean and bright
You look happy to meet me
Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow forever
Deutschland thread, Deutschland thread
Bless my homeland forever
I asked for the thread, but I don't really give a shit about Germany qua Germany (because hypocrisy and incompetence), so I'm mostly going to talk about Ukraine.
The glory and freedom of Ukraine has not yet perished
Luck will still smile on us brother-Ukrainians.
Our enemies will die, as the dew does in the sunshine,
and we, too, brothers, we'll live happily in our land.
viz., it's so dumb it shouldn't be worth thinking about, but we live in the dumbest timeline, so it might actually be world-historic: Trump is going to the Russian victory parade on May 9. Before the war, that parade was the main occupation of the Russian armed forces, so they put on a good show. Over the war years the parades have become increasingly threadbare. In 2025, Russia looks well set to exhaust its remaining stockpiles of Soviet armor. So, right now, Vovo needs to be deciding whether to commit vehicles and personnel* to the actual war in Ukraine or to the playacting of war in Moscow. Strip too much from the front and he loses the campaigning season. Strip too little and Trump will think he's a loser.
*A non-trivial consideration! Getting a parade not to look like total shit takes a lot of practice!
Unhelpfully,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Schleswig_Voters%27_Association#History
Die Linke rebounds, BSW fizzles?
7-8: Helpfully,
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCdschleswigscher_W%C3%A4hlerverband
They formed a state-level coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens in Schleswig-Holstein. They did not prohibit the joke about Palmerston and Prince Albert, so I presume their one member of parliament will be pretty leftish.
Like a Social Democrat but without the need to take one for the coalition.
6 he's going to try and probably get his own full blown military parade in DC this time too
Question for Doug, how much did Vance in Munich, Elon sieg heiling and full on support for AfD, etc., affect the election results?
How is it Germany permits explicitly ethnic parties?
6: It appears to be contested on whether he is going or not. But IIRC in his first term Trump tried to get a similar spectacle going in DC only to be dissuaded in part by considerations of unsuitability of DC streets for heavy armor.
I assume no such dissuaders will be in positions of power in the Pentagon. But we'll see what happens, as the man himself loves to say.
The SSW continues to pay further attention to the library system and demands the opportunity for all citizens to inform themselves cost-effectively in every community through books and other media. Each library should also be able to provide its users with free access to the Internet.Got my vote.
9: Yes.
10: I don't think they're headed for extinction. Germany could use a liberal internationalist party, and that's their traditional brand. But they've gotten well away from it lately, and the number of people who remember their time as kingmaker, balancer, and seat of foreign policy expertise is shrinking. I don't think that Volt, a potential alternative, has the people or the resources, and the FDP does have 75 years or so of brand awareness.
More to the point, NMM to the debt brake?
13: Maybe a little?
Merz playing footsie with the AfD and a fiery speech about it by the Linke leader played a bigger role. She's from the West, too, which nobody seems to be mentioning much. The Left is still mostly an eastern party, so it would be embarrassing for their first really effective leader to be a Wessi, but there ya go.
Passing two resolutions with AfD votes really activated left-of-center voters, and may have concentrated minds about voting for a party that a) was pretty sure to get into parliament and b) didn't flirt with red-brown nonsense.
I'm sure that Elon and Trump didn't help, but 80% of Germany dislikes Trump anyway, so I don't think they drove many voters away from AfD.
But then I see things like 150,000 Green voters going over to Sahra Wagenknecht, and I am forcefully reminded that there's a lot of crazy people out there. (Which several years of retail work should have taught me, but it probably makes for a healthier life to forget that most of the time.)
https://www.ft.com/content/4bc5438f-2deb-4026-aa99-746a7d3f9284
The highest turnout since reunification -- 82.5 per cent -- has largely benefited the AfD. The far right's surge came at the expense of all the other parties, but its greatest success was in mobilising non-voters: about 40 per cent of the 4.4mn voters the AfD gained were citizens who did not vote in 2021, according to exit polling by Infratest dimap for the broadcaster ARD.
14: All, or at least much, is explained in the links from 11. ;)
To a first approximation, it's because they are harmless, the minorities in question are very small, and their issues can be accommodated mostly without the population at large even noticing.
The far-left Die Linke made surprise gains -- it secured 8.8 per cent of the vote -- by mobilising the youngest voters. It has become the largest party among 18-24 year olds. The AfD came second however, which means that nearly half of Germany's youngest cohorts supported a party at both extremes of the political spectrum, up sharply from 2021.
22: Me too, Doug! But what do you *think*?!
21: Yeah, but still. Digging through de.wiki, was it basically a unique deal with Denmark?
https://www.ft.com/content/d070339c-a67c-4a31-8e2f-aef016296b08
One-quarter of men aged 18-24 voted for the far-right AfD compared with 14 per cent of women in the same age group. There was an even bigger gap in support for hard-left Die Linke, which was backed by 34 per cent of young women but just 15 per cent of young men.
Wait, they're Danish *and* Frisian? Ethnic party for two ethnic groups is a real surprise!
Ooh, the Sorbs also get an exception to the 5% rule, but only in Brandenburg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusatian_Alliance
Oh argh, 22 was supposed to have < adjusts zipper > there at the end. A tasteless joke ruined by html.
Anyway, to 24 I saw today that Merz was talking about getting that done during the waning days of this parliament, when a 2/3 majority might be available. (I haven't counted seats on this question.) In the new one, the Left is in favor of sending the debt brake off to NMM-land, but not for defense purposes. I'm not sure if they're movable on that and how Putin-friendly they're going to be. So it's a definite maybe.
Looking through regional parties it's funny that there's both one for Bavarian independence from Germany, and one for Franconian independence from Bavaria!
WHAT BULLSHIT IS THIS
And the wider question, will Merz's 'independence' be any more real than Scholz's 'zeitenwende'?
27: their lone MP has been quite clear that he sees the party as standing up for linguistic minorities and minorities generally as well as just having south Schleswig interests in mind. That said, it is literally true that they are financed by a foreign power (the Danish ministry of education, which subsidises language classes and libraries and folk dancing and whatnot through them).
WHAT BULLSHIT IS THIS
On 19, as I was saying on the twitter, the Left party is in a better place now it's free from having to act as a clientele party for retired apparatchiks who would sell their children for cheaper carsauce and want someone to tell them the wall was OK really. They won the election for people under 35. They can plan for a future. On the other hand, Ukraine probably won't be the no.1 news item in 2029 and a good deal of BSW's 4.9% will be dead, while I'm pretty sure being angry about housing and speaking up for diverse urban seats will still be valid issues.
Also, although it will still be the legal successor organization of the SED, the old-and-bold types who were actual members of it are going to age out very fast now. An amusing detail of the election is that Gregor Gysi is going to chair the organizing session of the new parliament as father of the house. But on the other hand, well, he's doing it as father of the house. So it's increasingly free to stop defending the DDR's, or indeed the USSR's, reputation and embrace its rebellious side, leaving the conservatankie mission to BSW.
For what's been a pretty content-free campaign, it's been an absolute massacre of big name politicians. Scholz is out, Habeck is out*, Lindner is out and the entire FDP leadership with him, Wagenknecht could be done with.
*although. he's 56 and might be a list MP, and despite Merz doing nearly nothing but insulting him through the campaign he had the second best personal approval rating, so I wouldn't rule out a comeback.
31: The Franconian party's motto -- "Frei statt Bayern" -- is a delightful pun that doesn't translate at all. And if it's not their official motto it certainly ought to be.
Alex, can you tell if the Left and SPD would have won more seats if they had run a joint list in the eastern states?
I'll have to make and eat dinner before I have anywhere close to enough brain function to attempt answering that question, but you might have checked already.
I know it's dumb to ask "did the election turn out differently than expected based on the preview I read, maybe in The Guardian?" because I only read one preview and I don't remember which one that was. But to phrase it a different way, were there big surprises in the election? I thought AfD was expected to get ~20% but I've also seen some say it's good news because they thought AfD would get 30%.
Not dumb at all to ask!
I don't know who was saying/writing that AfD was going to get 30% nationally. The weekly polls have been pretty steady for a year. (Which is its own problem, in a way.) And those did have AfD at around 20%.
The movement of the Left to nearly 9% where they had been polling, I think, in the 6% to 7% range qualifies as at least a moderate surprise. Personally, I think that Merz unwittingly delivered that to them by playing footsie with the AfD. It activated left-of-center voters, and the more active ones went Left rather than SPD.
The Left's parliamentary leader gave the strongest response to Merz's AfD gambit, and bits of it seem to have done really well on short-video social media. Shedding the BSW types also made the Left more acceptable to anti-tankie people, and that seems to have helped, which could not be known for certain before the election. Finally, the Left's parliamentary leader is from western Germany, which I am not seeing mentioned much in the media but I think it salient.
43: Thanks! The responses I saw were on social media and I think maybe they had been somewhat pessimistic that it would turn out that Musk had swung to election further right.
So, Die Linke brought in enough new voters not only to offset those lost to BSW but also to improve its overall position?
44: Glad to help! The idea of an unexpected swing driven by social media was not per se crazy, either, given what had happened in Romania a few weeks earlier.
45: Yes. Well, voted Left this time after having voted for someone else last time or not voted at all.
I'm not totally thrilled with the charts here
https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2025-02-23-BT-DE/analyse-wanderung.shtml
because they only show net changes, but it's still a decent resource. The Left gained the most from the Greens, second-most from the SPD, and only third-most from people who did not vote in the previous election (including people who were too young to vote then).
The Left gained twice as many voters from the Greens as they lost to BSW. They also lost 110,000 to AfD, people for whom BSW just wasn't brown enough, I suppose.
I would really like a silver lining for 23, if anyone can see one.
Before the surge, DL was polling around 5% and worrying about making the cut, to the extent that they shaped a strategy around defending three key direct MPs (because if you get three directs, you also get your whack of proportional list seats even if you're adding a bunch of directs. BSW for its part was hoping to knock off at least one, so as to torpedo DL, and borrow enough list votes to get over 5%.
41: well, as far as the proportional, list half of the election goes, a 9% list and a 16% list are exactly equivalent to one 25% list. Where this might help is on the direct, fptp half. Like a British parliamentary election it's possible for two parties who together have a plurality - even a majority - to split the vote and let a third through the middle. In such a scenario, either an electoral pact where the weaker of the two in each seat stands down in favour of the other, or tactical voting, where individual voters pick the stronger party in their seat, could help.
How much it could help depends on how many seats there are where the winning margin is less than the smaller party's tally, less any that the parties decide to exclude. If you have a three-way marginal where parties A, B, and C are all within a few votes of each other, A and B might both think they're in with a decent chance and so choose not to include it in the pact. I don't know the parameter values here and can't be bothered to look it up.
*However* there is an important difference between this and a British parliamentary election; the interaction between direct voting and list voting. It used to be the case that if a party got a big share of the list votes and a hatful of direct wins, so that in total it had more than its proportional share of MPs, it got to keep 'em all. As a result of this the Bundestag could vary in size to accommodate extra winners. Over time, because direct winners try to build up a local base, the parliament tended to grow. Eventually the supreme court found that this was unconstitutional because parties benefiting from it got a over-proportional bonus, violating the principle that votes were all equal.
This time out, the election was held under new rules. The total size of the parliament has been cut from 733 to 630 and fixed at that number. Now, if you get more direct MPs than your proportional share, the list votes trump the direct votes, and some of the direct candidates miss out as the total delegation is trimmed to match your share of the vote.The seats so trimmed just go without direct representation*. On this occasion, 13 winning candidates (and more importantly, their electors) have been told that, well, it sucks to be you.
This has an important consequence for an electoral pact strategy, because an electoral pact strategy works by using the parties' combined votes more efficiently to win direct seats. If they're running behind the proportional share in terms of directs, it would boost their directs, but once the directs pass that mark you would be docked down to the proportional share.
*I find this deeply weird and wonder how long it will last before someone makes the obvious legal challenge
48.last: agreed, this is very weird indeed. Allowing the list votes to trump the direct votes is surely not the way this works in other countries?
How many other countries have the half-direct, half-proportional composition of parliament? I am insufficiently caffeinated today to recall.
Alex, that's helpful, especially the interaction between list and direct mandates. I agree in expecting further tinkering with the election law, even though I'm terrible about remembering the mechanics of Überhangsmandate and Ausgleichmandate. There's probably not a works-forever solution, so there will be probably be tinkering every election or two.
There are already notable media stories about electoral districts that will go without a directly elected parliamentarian, and it seems such a basic injustice that I don't expect it to last.
Systems like this are usually described as "top-up", with the idea being that the direct result is topped up with list MPs until the final parliament is proportional to the share of vote, but this variation is more like "top-under"; it's really odd
47: As a silver lining to 23 (the Left becoming the top party for younger voters), I offer that the Left has become less tankie by shedding voters and, importantly, leaders with that tendency to the BSW. I really hope the BSW doubles down instead of trying to slink back.
The apparatchiki are dying off, their defenders are fading, and with it the Left's tendency to reflexively defend the GDR past and Moscow's present. We might start to see bigger fights within the Left between realos and fundis, but those wound up being sorta productive for the Greens and something similar might play out within the Left.
It seems designed to penalise very regional parties, which win lots of direct seats in one small part of the country but have very few supporters (and so very few list votes) anywhere else?
The only silver lining I have to offer about the right-hand part of 47/23 is that voters in eastern Germany have been as volatile as their fellow post-communist voters in other parts of Central Europe. Over the last five national elections, they have returned large numbers of direct candidates for AfD most recently, before that SPD, then CDU twice, then a nearly even CDU-Left split.
Scotland is half direct, and half list, but the list half is larger 6-member districts and not the whole country. It's always the same size, and they count your direct seats against you when assigning the list seats.
SNP usually gets over-represented on the first-past-the-post seats, this leads to some strategic SNP+Green voting.
55: The list vote is regional, so for example this isn't a problem for the CSU; they get a hatful of directs but they're also a huge chunk of the Bavarian list vote so no harm (and you betcha Karlsruhe wasn't going to make the CSU illegal).
Here's a good article about how the consequences played out: https://archive.ph/20250224112629/https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/bundestagswahl/neues-wahlrecht-bei-bundestagswahl-2025-diese-politiker-sind-direkt-gewaehlt-kommen-aber-nicht-in-den-bundestag-110316637.html
In Hessen, the CDU won 20 out of 22 direct mandates and got 28.9% of the list vote. Under the old, old rules they would have kept their 20 directs and got some list seats too (the overhang Doug mentioned). Under the old rules, they would have kept 20 directs and a share of the lists, with the number of MPs increasing as necessary so the smaller parties could have a proportional number of list MPs (the Ausgleichs Doug mentioned). Under the new rules, they get crammed down to observe proportionality without creating more MPs, so 5 out of 20 directs lose out. The choice is in inverse order of winning margin, so the five most marginal winners get the chop.
This has some weird results - consider Frankfurt II, where Leopold Born was elected with less than a percentage point of margin over the former Green leader Omid Nouripour. Because Born was among the five most marginal, the seat stays vacant. However, Nouripour was also No.2 on the Green party regional list, being a big shot in the party and one facing a difficult race (this is a common practice). So Nouripour, who lost, is in parliament, and Born, who won, is not, because he wasn't a high list candidate (something which is entirely up to his party to decide, a common criticism of the system). Overall it seems that strongly contested urban marginals are much more likely to be affected and the CDU itself is the worst hit of the parties.
The combination of prioritising the list and choosing by inverse winning margin means it's like the opposite of a FPTP election where you get a bonus for having an efficient distribution of voters with just enough of yours to put as many candidates as possible over the top.
57: Yeah, that's a toughie.
My son began to sour on Musk about the time of the Thai cave escapade, or a little after. I asked him recently what turned the tide, and he was like, "I dunno, I guess I just grew up." Which was gratifying, but unhelpful in any larger sense, and definitely doesn't scale.