Cannons To The Right Of Me, Cannons To The Left Of Me

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Gerhard Schröders electoral troubles only seem to increase. With Merkel’s lead seemingly consolidating rather than reducing, a recent poll now shows the alliance between the former communists in the east and Election Alternative in the west set to win 8% of the vote:

Experts say the new group could attract votes from Social Democrats in the west unhappy with Schroeder’s efforts to trim social programs, and from unemployed people in the economically depressed east fed up with his recent cuts in unemployment benefits.

A poll showed the alliance getting 8 percent ? well over the 5 percent barrier needed for representation in parliament. Schroeder’s party had 27 percent, trailing the conservative Christian Democrats of challenger Angela Merkel at 44 percent.

The poll, for ZDF television by the Mannheim Election Research Group, surveyed 1,175 people June 21-23. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

The new group showed its appeal Tuesday when veteran Social Democratic legislator in the state of Baden-Wuerttemburg defected to take up its cause. Ulrich Mauer, the party’s former regional head, said he was joining the left alliance because it was “the only chance” to stop the advance of the center-right.

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

6 thoughts on “Cannons To The Right Of Me, Cannons To The Left Of Me”

  5. It sounds realistic, but this is an election which +/- 2% could make a significant difference in. I just don’t see how you can compute likely voter numbers for a party that has never run. Therefore I’d say that all we can know now is that the present government will fall, anything else is unknown.

  6. If you look here:

    http://www.wahlrecht.de/ueberhang/ueberhist.html

    You’ll see the history of overhanging seats. Clearly you can see that the eastern state caused a drastic rise in the number of the overhanging seats. This is due to the existance of a strong third party. I can imagine the WASG/PDS having the effect in all of Germany. This benefits the predominant party, in this election the CDU. I predict a record number of overhanging seats in the next election.

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