The CSU has been the largest party in Bavaria for the entire postwar period. As the national level, it has functioned in practice as the Bavarian wing of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), although the CDU maintains a nominal Bavarian state party.
The AfD is a new, rightwing populist and bitterly anti-immigrant, TrumPutinist party that won seats in the national Parlament for the first time in 2017. This will be their first time represented in the Bavarian Landtag. The CSU has been competing with them as to which party can be more convincingly anti-immigrant. Pre-election polls had shown the AfD with possibly significantly more than 10% and the CSU potentially much lower than their actual result.
I read the outcome as showing that the anti-immigrant sentiment as not surging electorally. With the CSU and the AfD together winning 48%, it's hard to see how that would count as a big rejection of the anti´-immigrant sentiment. But the overtly pro-immigrant Greens surged to become the second-largest party in Bavaria. That's the real success story of Sunday's election.
There's nothing good for democracy in the TrumPutinist AfD winning 10% of the vote. But that showing still leaves them as only the fourth-largest party.
The SPD's showing, though, is being understood even by the SPD as catastrophic. Their support compared to the last election in 2013 was cut by more than half. (Per Wikipedia)
The Austrian channel ORF in their ZiB program this morning (9:00 15.10.2018) reports the Bavarian election as follows:
CSU 37.2%
Grüne 17.5%
Freie Wähler 11.6%
AfD 10.2%
SPD 9.7%
FDP 5.1%
Linke 3.2%
Sonstige 5.5%
Mike Szymanski's report, Ein Sturm zieht auf Süddeutsche Zeitung 15.10.2018 as of 2:00AM, has identical numbers except for a different rounding on the Sonstige ("Other") group.
In the German parliamentary system, parties have to get a minimum percentage of the popular vote to be represented in the legislature. In Bavaria, 5% is the minimum. So for the six parties that made the hurdle Sunday, the seats in the Landtag (state legislature) will be approtioned according to established formulas. Even the number of total legislative seats can change based on the results.
In the ideological spectrum that is reflected in Landtag seating, the spectrum from left to right of the six parties to be seated is: Greens, SPD, Freie Wähler, CSU, FDP, AfD. (The left-right rankng can vary from one state to the other.)
Speculating which party's voters switched to another one is an important one that can be measured with polling data. Exact measurements will probably have to wait until androids have inherited the earth. Some judgment is always involved. But it seems safe to speculate that many of the Greens' voters supported the SPD in 2013. And that most of the AfD voters would previously have voted AfD.
In two weeks, October 28, another state Landtag election takes place in Hessen. The political tea-leaf readers, including the party strategists, will be scrutinizing the significance of the Bavarian and Hessian elections for the national parties. Merkel's Grand Coalition (GroKo) of the CDU/CSU and SPD could be weakened or even dissolved as the parties react, the latter bringing a new national election. Much of the SPD base seems to think that their party's participation in the GroKo has weakened them badly. The Bavarian SPD's big drop in the vote percentage, and the fact that it wound up as the fifth-largest party will encourage that criticism.
This is an hour-and-half report from early morning Monday from the conservative news organization Welt (German), Bayern hat gewählt - Alle Zahlen und Fakten 15.10.2018:
No comments:
Post a Comment