In a comment to Tobias’s post below, Guerby complains that he/she/they can’t find the election results.
Well, then, look here. Updated every ten minutes. Since my last post, the Union have widened their lead over SPD to a full percentage point; but FDP are back down to single digits. All just changes round the margin, though; and the SPD seem to have done better out of the ‘overhang mandates’ than have the Union.
No dramatic changes likely between now and the official results, then.
I’ve been harshing on the Union and their little dog Toto the FDP pretty nastily throughout the campaign.1 Surely, though, I should spare a thought for Die Linke.
It’s easy to fail to pay the ‘Left Party’ the attention they deserve, mostly because nobody is likely to form a coalition with them. But still it should be noted: they did very well in this election. They should receive the congratulations they deserve.
Congratulations, then, wendebeschädigte East German communists: you polled surprisingly well, once you put yourselves under a West German carpetbagger.
And congratulations, Oskar Lafontaine. Many years ago you were the only major German political leader willing to speak the truth about the cost of unification. What a way you’ve come since then, finishing your career by becoming the first West German head of the SED.
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Those numbers are starting to gel. There’s been movement, as one would expect, but mostly on the right-hand side of the decimal point. SPD look to have polled very slightly better, the Union very slightly worse than it seemed an hour ago. (But NB: Hessia is still uncertain.)
Schröder has just spoken. On the one hand, he ruled out Red/Green/Even Redder once again. On the other, he stated that he’d be continuing as chancellor. If he’s not merely spouting shite, that can mean only one thing: Red/Yellow/Green, the ‘Ampel‘. One wonders whether he already had a deal sewn up with Guido.
The Union have actually done worse than they did under Stoiber in the previous elections. The first post-election casualty, then, is likely to be Angela Merkel. There will be no shortage of CDU knives out for her now. Her career is probably over. And that’s a real pity; she’s far the best of the lot of them.
The first preliminary projections in the German election have been released, as usual, at 18.00. As expected, the Union have the most votes. As unexpected, they’re not doing nearly as well as people had thought, polling a mere 2% ahead of the SPD at 35.7%. Of those 10 million voters ‘undecided’ as the campaign drew to a close, 30% broke for the Union, but 33% for SPD. The big surprise is the FDP, who with more than 10% are doing much better than I’d have expected. But at this point neither B/Y nor R/G have a majority.
This is all to be taken with many very large grains of salt. It’s early evening yet, and those numbers are but a preliminary extrapolation. Still, at this moment the likeliest outcomes (to judge on a purely numerical basis) seem to be a grand coalition or the ‘Ampel‘ that everybody had been rejecting out of hand.
There’s nothing better for livening up all this dull, wonkish chatter about the German elections than a bit of CDU-bashing. So, how shall I bash them today? Oh, I know! How about this: they’re a shower of xenophobe racists.
Yes, yes; not exactly news, is it? What is news, though, is that the Union appears to value xenophobia even more than it does winning elections.
Oodles of stuff here about the German elections these days, you’ll have noticed. Meanwhile, in our secret headquarters deep beneath Brussels, we afoers are sitting round enjoying fat Cohibas and lashings of ancient brandy in snifters the size of your head, talking about (what else?) football, when suddenly one of the technical staff rushes into the boardroom, all apologies at disturbing us but perhaps we’d better have a look at this item that has just come across his monitor:
EuroSportwetten has a unique 50-1 double-header for Hanover’s modest soccer club to beat German champions Bayern Munich on Saturday and Hanover’s best-known citizen, Schroeder, to be victorious the day after.
Schröder to beat Merkel and Hannover to beat FCB? At 50-1 those odds are far too short, surely. Daniel Davies is fascinated by electoral betting markets; perhaps he’ll want to look into the arbitrage opportunity here.
You already know, because Alex has been doing such a good job of making sure you do, that the impending German elections will be as close-run as the related campaign has been shambolic. According to the polls, the Union and FDP will outpoll the currently governing SPD-Green coalition; but not by enough for a majority. What’s more, the Union has been slipping (slightly) of late whilst the SPD are (slightly) gaining. Black/Yellow (48%) are still doing better than Red/Green (42%), but not as well as Red/Green/Even Redder1 (49%).
What’s interesting about all this, though, is the number that’s not being loudly pointed at: Red/Green/Yellow, which is currently the same as Black/Yellow. This is the so-called Ampelkoalition (‘traffic-light coalition’, based on party colours). Down in the comments to one of Alex’s earlier posts there’s been some talk about this as an increasingly likely outcome of the vote, though one commenter begs to differ.
Back in July, I posted about the Parliamentary elections in Albania. Dedicated readers may recall that the Socialist government of PM Fatos Nano lost, and the opposition Democrats (under former PM Sali Berisha) won… but that Nano was refusing to concede defeat.
Well, he finally did. It took nearly two months, and three special runoff elections, but Nano at last conceded the election on Tuesday. Sali Berisha is now Prime Minister.
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Far be it from me to poach on Alex’s turf, but here is a bit of German election madness that you won’t want to miss.
As you all know by now, the Left Party — which is basically the eastern PDS, the mutated ruling party of ancien régime East Germany, plus some hard-left western renegades from the SPD — has emerged as a strong potential spoiler. Now an easterner from the other extreme of the spectrum is doing her best to throw sand in the electoral gears.
She had to die to do this, so full marks for effort if nothing else.
Crickey, this is news:
“Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Thursday he was sacking the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.”
That didn’t last long, did it? The background is clearly this.
Yesterday EU Observer was reporting MEPs as saying that the Orange Revolution needed a ‘shot in the arm‘, it looks like what it may have received was something nearer to a lethal dose.