2021 German Federal election thread
The Guardian live update thread
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The CDU and SPD are tied, although it seems the SPD is for now leading by a slim margin
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The 3 left-of-center parties have a minority of seats together, meaning they couldn't form a government together if they wanted to
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Die Linke is close to the electoral cut-off of entering parliament, and risks getting nothing this election(it appears this is not the case because Linke usually win more than 3 constituency seats, which invalidates the 5% threshold.) -
The AfD and the FDP seem to be likely to get the same amount of votes that got in 2017
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The Greens and SPD have grown by similar margins (but the current polling rise is the SPD's polling rise)
How do you feel about the election as it stands? Also include any more live updates if you know of them.
SPD narrowly wins German election against Merkel's CDU but uncertainty remains over next leader
(maybe should be its own post?)
What a shit show. I mean, let's wait for reliable results first, but with the current distribution of votes, it looks like this might become a mess. Options I see currently:
What's the deal with the FDP? What happened "last time"? They seem to have a lot of negotiating power in this situation.
Not entirely up to date on the last round, but there were extremely long negotiation talks between the CDU (center-right, conservative, Merkel's party), the Greens and the FDP (rightwing liberals, aka the free market solves everything). This was known as the Kenia coalition (black, green, yellow). After weeks of heavy deliberation and constant discussion and talks and everyone apparently being very close to a solution and coalition contract, the FDP blew the talks and said it's not happening, pushing the SDP (center-left), the partner of the CDU in the last government into another coalition with the CDU to form the government, despite them saying originally that they didn't want to get into government again (prompting the Kenia coalition talks). This CDU/SDP coalition formed the last government and was very unpopular. Together with Merkel leaving, this resulted in a heavy hit in the votes for the CDU.
In this situation, the FDP is being treated as the Kingmaker, as they and the Greens can be coalition partners in a lot of different combos for a possible government, which is why they have a lot of power in the discussion right now.
Small correction: the coalition between CDU (black), Greens and FPD (yellow) is called Jamaica coalition.
Seems like a lot is hanging on the Greens and the FDP finding common ground, which seems unlikely?
There is overlap there, especially when it comes to education, both want to heavily invest in it for example. But I don't know the exact details.
How much do you think the SPD (voters and/or politicians) would like making a coalition with Linke since it seems a lot of their base are Ostalgists as opposed to Wholesome Progressive Democratic Socialists? Would they prefer looking at the FDP for coalition instead?
What's the context for what happened last election?
Can you elaborate? The current government seems to act very centrist being the unity of the center left and center right, but Germany seems to be doing well for itself being the largest nation in and leader of Europe, alongside being one of the nations progressives the world over tend to look up to. A left-of-center coalition would undoubtedly be significantly better than a fifth Centrist coalition but their German status quo doesn't seem that bad, no?
Yeah, this would definitely be the horrible ending. Do you think there's any chances this can happen if the CSU took their lead back? Both the FDP and CSU (well, I don't know about the FDP) are making fairly serious commitments to not letting the AfD into a government, but given they would need them to make a right-wing government, I wonder how willing they really are to stick to this commitment.
I think so, yeah. I think most of the centrists would prefer the FDP over the Linke. FDP has a reputation of being essentially about business interests.
Paging /u/nothis for this one too. Essentially, the parliament was split about as badly as this time around (i.e. the currently sitting/leaving parliament), and the SPD had vocally ruled out a SPD/CDU coalition ahead of time. They had done such a coalition before as Merkel's junior partner, and their voters hated it, because they essentially got nothing of their own stuff done while allowing the CDU to trample all over them in some frankly humiliating ways, e.g. by completely ignoring the agreement that forms the basis for the coalition. So with that in mind we head into the difficult phase of finding a coalition. SPD says "nope, sorry, we're out, our plans aren't going to work out", not really having a democratic mandate anyway by way of election results. So they try to figure out whether a CDU/FDP/Green coalition could work. And the one party in that coalition who should be able to find the most common ground with both other partners, FDP, nopes out of there in a "not my problem" fashion. So now the president asks CDU and SPD to get their shit together. IMO the option of a CDU minority government was completely ignored here. Frankly, a very democratic way of forming a government in such a situation that we might wanna revive one of these days. Anyway, we get a SPD/CDU coalition. Now no one is happy. Good job, FDP.
I'm politically aligned somewhere in the Green/SPD/Linke sphere. From my point of view (see also last paragraph), SPD/CDU coalitions end real bad for the SPD (might be different if they're the senior partner, but who knows). Essentially, the CDU is acting in a kind of brinksmanship manner here, completely ignoring previous agreements. One example would be, iirc, the whole EU copyright act thing about upload filtering: SPD says we're not gonna do that. They make that a condition for the formation of a coalition with the CDU. CDU: "sure, we'll not do that". Then the CDU does that. Now, the SPD should do either of three things: Make the CDU fix it; backstab the CDU on a similarly important topic, or just blow up the coalition right there and force either a CDU minority government or a reelection. Their actual reaction: "Upload filters? No such thing. I don't know what you're talking about".
Yeah, I don't know. They all promised "yeah, we won't do a AFD coalition", but see above: The SPD promised no CDU coalition either, and look at the current government. If it's politically opportune, they'll do it. Sure, if you do this, you might get punished next election, but you'll just spend 4 years in opposition and heal a bit, and the voters will have forgotten all about that.
From the live thread of the Guardian:
I think this is the strongest evidence for the SPD doing nothing with this election victory, other than the very slim victory margins and minority of a red-green-red "left-of-center unity" government. It seems the voters the SPD won are likely SPD-CDU swing voters, who I would imagine aren't really too politically engaged and don't really mind the status quo beyond immediate problems like the pandemic too much, since potentially 30% of the SPD's vote according to the polling basically didn't exist 2 months ago.
Linke are sitting at 4.9% right now. If that doesn't improve, it's not looking good for a red-green-red coalition.
Also, does anyone know whether the 5% rule is applied in one swoop or iteratively? If you discount all the minor parties, the Linke holds 5.3% of the vote (of all the parties that would be in parliament) which would suffice. But otherwise, they're sitting at 4.9%.
Apparently if you win 3 of the FPTP districts with the first ballot the cut-off doesn't apply. (From here):