Monthly Archives: September 2005

Catastrophic success?

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In one of his many excellent pieces in the run-up to the German election, Alex mentioned the phenomenon of ‘overhang mandates’. These are extra parliamentary seats that a party gains by winning more seats via one of German’s two electoral methods than by the other. This might seem odd enough. What’s even odder is that a party could lose a seat if too many people vote for it.

German electoral law is complex. In a comment to one of Tobias’s posts, Florian recommended the wahlrecht.de website as a good primer on how it works. He also mentioned examples of some of the electoral weirdnesses explained by wahlrecht.de. For example, did you know (asks Florian) that, under certain circumstances, a vote can have ‘negative weight’ — can reduce the parliamentary representation of the party for which it is cast?

Well, it can. And this conundrum is worth looking at closely, because right now it is more than a mere electoral curiosity. There is one electoral district in Germany, Dresden I, that has not yet voted. (Those who’ve been paying a perhaps unhealthy level of attention to the German elections will know that the death of a neonazi candidate has forced the delay of the election.) And in Dresden I, there is a very real chance that a local triumph of the CDU could cause the party to lose a seat in the national parliament. The reason? It’s those overhang mandates that Alex kept mentioning.

Excellent as wahlrecht.de is, it’s in German. Below the fold, then, is a summary explanation of how the CDU could lose a seat by gaining votes. For those who read German and are interested in that sort of thing, there are links to the relevant passages of the BWahlG (German Federal Electoral Act).

In the mean time, we should note that the possible ‘negative weight’ of CDU votes in Dresden I, though perverse and undemocratic, would not affect the overall results in Germany. Even if the CDU are ‘catastrophically successful’ in Dresden I, the Union will still have more seats than the SPD, albeit with a lead of only 2 rather than 3 MPs. The really perverse thing that could come out of the Dresden special election is this: CDU and SPD wind up with an equal number of seats. As the Spiegel explains, however, this is mathematically a possibility, but in real-world terms exceedingly unlikely. To achieve this result, the SPD would need to poll 91% of voters in the district, and every single eligible voter would have to vote.

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Poland To Hold Euro Referendum?

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Poland is having elections Next Sunday. They are getting rather less press coverage than the German ones, but one issue does now seem to have hit the news:

Poland could be heading for a referendum on the adoption of the euro in late 2009…. Centre-right group Civic Platform (PO) and the eurosceptic Law and Justice party (PiS) both came out in favour of a referendum on the single currency in the Polish press on Monday (19 September), with Law and Justice proposing a date toward the end of the parliament’s next four year-long session.

The latest opinion polls tip Civic Platform to win the general elections by 32 percent with Law and Justice picking up 27 percent and the pair planning to form a powerful new coalition that will be less friendly toward the euro and the EU Constitution than the present left-wing government (SLD).

Sharp Decline In German Investor Confidence

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NTC research is reporting that investor confidence declined sharply in Germany in September. The research – by think tank ZEW – was carried out between September 5 and Monday at 1500 GMT. So the reading is weighted to pre-election (but post Merkel slump) answers:

German investor confidence fell in September due in major part to uncertainty about the country’s future economic policies, a survey by the ZEW economic think tank showed on Tuesday.

ZEW’s expectations indicator, based on a poll of 309 analysts and institutional investors, fell to 38.6, from 50.0 in August.

”An essential reason for the declining indicator is that uncertainty about the future economic policy may affect the investment climate and puts the economic upswing at risk, ” ZEW said in a statement.

Slowed or stalled?

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Taking a break from the German elections, I ran across this recent article over at Radio Free Europe. Short version: EU accession for the Western Balkans (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Albania) is stalling.

All of these five states would like to be part of the EU, but — with the partial exception of Croatia — none of them are particularly welcome. The EU appears to be going through a period of “accession fatigue” in general. The “No” votes in France and the Netherlands, though not directed specifically at these countries, have definitely created an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty.

Furthermore, many of the countries of the Western Balkans are — there’s no way to be polite about this — unpopular. A recent Eurobarometer poll shows that more people oppose membership for Bosnia (43%) than support it. Only 40% of Europeans support EU membership for Serbia, while 44% oppose it. And for Albania, those numbers are a depressing 36% for, 50% against.

Obviously this could change over time. Again with the exception of Croatia, all of these countries are at least a decade away from membership. So opinions might shift. Still, the poll numbers suggest that there’s not much popular support within the EU for even starting the process.

Looking at the potential members one by one, below the flip.
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Grand Larceny?

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Crickey, this really does seem to fall under the definition of what you could call a scandal. According to the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn one billion dollars was plundered from Iraq’s defence Ministry between June 2004 and February 2005 (during the government of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi):

“It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history,” Ali Allawi, Iraq’s Finance Minister, told The Independent. “Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal.”