The General Election in Germany 2017

[Stavros]

Germans go to the polls on the 24th of September 2017 to elect a new Bundestag and with it either return Angela Merkel as Chancellor of the Federal Republic, or elect a new one to replace her. The polls suggest that she will be returned to power with her party, the CDU the largest overall, but not large enough to govern alone, coalition government being standard in Germany these days.

The key points of interest will focus on the size of Merkel's representation in the Bundestag, as this is the first nationwide election since the refugee crisis of 2015 and thus there are -or were- some estimates that expected Merkel's CDU to lose votes to the right-wing AfD (Alternativ fur Deutschland) whereas internal bickering and a strident message has in more recent months suggested support for the AfD is in decline. Germany may thus be in a position that was found in the Netherlands and France earlier this year, where the insurgent anti-EU and anti-Muslim vote failed to make any significant advance. Note also that in Germany the AfD needs at least 5% of the vote to get into the Bundestag.

The Greens in recent years have stagnated as a party, failing to build on their success of the 1980s and 1990s, but the intriguing situation of the Left may, as in the UK, either grow in support or as in France, lose it. The centre-left SPD has failed to tackle Merkel, its supporters have gravitated to the AfD though some may move more left, but this suggests they will fail again to challenge the CDU as the largest party.

This link offers a fairly clear perspective on how Germany votes:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...rman-election/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...election,_2017

[peejaye]

Not up-to-date on the German Front anymore but I lived there when Merkel first got elected. There were rumours she was going to raise taxes from 16% to 19% which her voters denied. She actually raised it to 20%!
I remember our refuse collection workers in Heidelberg being on strike over "Tory style" revisions to contracts, working more hours for the same pay etc & rail workers being on strike in Hamburg & Berlin during her first month in office! Surprised she's lasted so long?

[Stavros]

Not up-to-date on the German Front anymore but I lived there when Merkel first got elected. There were rumours she was going to raise taxes from 16% to 19% which her voters denied. She actually raised it to 20%!
I remember our refuse collection workers in Heidelberg being on strike over "Tory style" revisions to contracts, working more hours for the same pay etc & rail workers being on strike in Hamburg & Berlin during her first month in office! Surprised she's lasted so long?

She has lasted so long a) because years of coalition government in Germany has tended to de-fang the mainstream parties so that Merkel has stolen SPD policies and in the process made them often appear to be a redundant party. B) the SPD's lack of a distinctive policy platform and credible leadership material has also benefited Merkel. Indeed, some solid SPD voters have told the BBC they would rather vote AfD because of the 2015 refugee policy, rather in the way some working class Labour voters appeared to be moving to UKIP around the time of the EU referendum if not the 2017 elections. Also, the left in general is split in Germany between the SPD and Die Linke, made up mostly of former East German Communists. Merkel has the advantage of being considered a 'safe pair of hands' and for all the doubts that were raised in 2015 earlier this year her party beat the SPD in the SPD stronghold of Nord-Rhein Westphalia so there is a solid base of support for her which other leaders do not have.

Germany, like the UK has to some extent thrived on a mix of a high and low-wage economy, but the economy is larger and more diverse, and the gap between the super-rich and the rest while present in Germany as it is in the UK does not seem to be so stark, and most of the super-rich are industrialists who actually make things, like cars, rather than Hedge Fund managers or real estate millionaires. However, in the longer term the rate of population growth of Germans is slowing so that over the next 25 years there may be a shortage of skilled adults, one reason why a German I know is not that bothered by immigration as he sees it as a necessity if the German economy is to maintain its strength into the future.

It may be the case that Merkel wins this election, probably her last, and that the difficult question is -who comes after her? At the very least, whether one is on the left or right, this is a woman who commands respect. She speaks German, Russian, English and French (allegedly her Russian is not that good and she speaks German with Putin). She has a grasp of party politics and policy that exposes the weakness of many of her international equals, with the exception of the President of the USA who is so thick he asked her 11 times if the US could sign a trade deal with Germany because he simply does not understand how the EU works, even when it is explained to him 11 times. It is therefore no surprise if Mrs Merkel is now considered the leader of the 'free world' given that the US has taken several steps backward and is currently not taken seriously as a player in international politics.

https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...opular/279887/

https://www.ft.com/content/542f2652-...8-c461bbb2527c

[Stavros]

First results from the Federal Elections in Germany have not produced any surprises (the full results will be available later this week).

As expected, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been returned as leader of the largest party, the Christian Democrats (along with the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian 'sister' party -the CDU does not campaign in Bavaria and the CSU does not campaign outside it); the SPD remain the second largest party, but whereas in the previous election in 2013 the Left (die Linke), the Free Democrats and the Greens all received a higher share of the vote than the Allternative for Germany (AfD), in 2017 the AfD has leapfrogged these three smaller parties to become the third largest party in Germany.

The CDU/CSU share of the vote in 2013 was 41.54% and in 2017 so far it is 32.93%.
The SPD share of the vote in 2013 was 25.73% and in 2017 so far it is 20.51%.
The left -Die Linke- share of the vote in 2013 was 8.59% and in 2017 so far it is 9.24%.
The Free Democrat share of the vote in 2013 was 4.76% and in 2017 so far it is 10.75%.
The Green Party share of the vote in 2013 was 8.45% and in 2017 so far it is 8.94%.
The AfD share of the vote in 2013 was 4.70% and in 2017 so far it is 12.64%.

By obtaining more than 5% of the vote all of the above parties will be represented in the Bundestag.
Voter turnout in 2013 was 71.5%, in 2017 vote turnout has been 76.02%.

The elections will result in a coalition government, but Angela Merkel has already said she will not seek any accommodation with the AfD.

The main talking point in the election is the drop in support for Merkel, and the rise of the AfD to become the third-largest party in Germany and the first right wing extreme party to sit in the Bundestag since the Third Reich. Indeed, one of the basic aims of the Chistian Democrats, founded in June 1945, was to be the voice of German conservative politics and to be the only party on 'the right' of politics in the country, in what became the Federal Republic of Germany. Although some believe the Bavarian Christian Social Union may be more to the right of the CDU the two parties occupy more or less the same ground so the fact that the AfD has emerged to challenge the CDU on the right has caused a lot of concern, as did their election campaign which featured hysterical anti-Islamic posters, even though the issue of refugees may not be the primary cause of their success, and the East which has become the most reliable source of votes for the AfD has the smallest amount of immigrants and refugees in the country.

The Alternativ fur Deutschland was officially formed in 2013 to contest the Federal elections, being a merger of the Election Alternative 2013, grouped around people who came together in 2012 and whose primary issue was taking Germany out of the Eurozone, and the Free Voters, who had no specific policies other than being opposed to the existing system. Although they participated together in the local elections that year, when the AfD was formed the Free Voters went their own way.

The AfD has, like most fringe parties been characterised by its internal divisions and incoherence on policy. A party that started out -like UKIP- with Germany's position in the EU its central concern, has since become in effect, an anti-immigrant party whose tone and language for some is too redolent of the Nazi past to make the AfD a respectable opponent. A good example is the fact that one of the co-leaders of the AfD when it began, Frauke Petry, within hours of being elected to the Bundestag yesterday, resigned the party whip so that in effect, the AfD now has 94 rather than 95 seats in parliament. When Petry was elected speaker of the party in 2015 it lost MEPs and prominent AfD leaders who detested Petry and her attempt to make AfD an anti-Islamic party with policies that included reducing immigration and strengthening ties with Russia.

Geographically, the AfD has its strongest representation in what was East Germany before unification, historically the region that also recorded the most reliable proportion of votes for the National Socialists in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. However, it is not a simple case of the AfD winning votes because of the way Merkel handled the 2015 refugees crisis, because the standard of living in the East is lower than in the West, wages are lower, unemployment is higher, and in a deeper sense the largely agricultural east has been seen as different from the more industrial west, although this difference may only date from the onset of the industrial revolution and the dominance in the east of the Prussians, as many German historians believe the structural differences in Germany run on a north-south axis and have been shaped by the influences of the Roman Empire (which in its last years collapsed owing to the rebellious tribes of northern Germany that were never subdued by the Empire), and by the division between Protestant and Catholic.

In addition, voters in the west may have spurned both Merkel and the SPD to give the established party a slap in the face much as we have seen in the USA and France. In Germany the left is if not defeated, the smaller parties actually recorded modest increases in their vote, and with no major slumps in votes the SPD, CDU and perhaps the Greens could recover from this result at the expense of the AfD.

My guess is that the AfD is a flash in the pan party like UKIP, which became the largest party in the European Parliament in 2014 and sent the Conservative Party into a panic. The AfD has no practical policies to offer that would benefit Germany, the party itself is riddled with factions who cannot agree on what their primary purpose is (UKIP again), has no clear leader (UKIP), and other than being a protest party has no future. It is also the case that while voters are puishing Merkel in part for the refugee crisis and the low-wage economy that Germany has become, they may also be voting AfD because they see the CDU as having stolen so many policies from the SPD as to have moved from Centre-Right to Centre if not Centre-Left. If Merkel did indeed vacate the right wing of German politics, she has only herself to blame if another party emerges to claim the nationalist vote.

Federal Election results 2017 are here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...election,_2017

2013 results here-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German...election,_2013

Frauke Petry resigns the whip-
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...-a7965321.html

Useful article that explains differences between East and West Germany
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...nd-west-really