The far-right AfD party won the state elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia with 30.5% of the vote on Sunday (1 September), according to exit polls, marking the party's first win in a state election.
With how absolutely entrenched the CDU is in our political system, this is about as bad as you could reasonably expect it to be. The CDU is an overall incredibly dominant party and the others are often competing for second place, which the AFD has gotten now. Them actually competing on that level is frankly terrifying.
The long term strategy is to destabilise the CDU by forcing them into unfavorable coalitions. Which they have probably achieved this time. If the CDU looks bad enough in 5 years the AfD might get enough votes so that no government can be built without them
Is this projection only from exit polls or the actual count?
Also how does the whole ‘two votes’ thing work - from what I understand you have one vote that’s basically a singe transferable vote type and another for your local electorate that’s proportional representation (but I’m not sure what counting system is used)
I don’t know exactly how their electoral system works but the baseline in Germany is mixed member proportional. That is, you have a FPTP vote for a district seat, and also a proportional vote. If parties get less district seats than their proportional result, members are added to parliament from party lists until the proportions work out.
I don’t think STV is used anywhere, the FPTP portion is kept in check by the proportional thing anyway. When things are more complicated than baseline mixed member proportional it generally has to do with voters being able to re-arrange people on the party lists.
It’s projected from the actual (then still unfinished) count but I think it uses some data from the exit polls to fill in the gap. So both?
We now have a preliminary official result. You can see it here: Saxony, Thuringia
@barsoap@lemm.ee has explained the basics of our electoral system pretty well: The first vote (Erststimme) is towards a candidate in a FPTP system to represent an electoral district and the second vote (Zweitstimme) for a party in a closed list proportional representative system. A party nominates a bunch of candidates and ranks them on a list. If they get enough votes to get a certain number of seats then those get filled first with candidates elected by Erststimme and then with candidates from the list starting at the top.
A party needs to win at least 5% of the Zweitstimme or win at least 3 seats using the Erststimme to be awarded any seats. This was done as a lesson from Weimar Germany where too many small parties made coalition building impossible which helped Hitlers rise to power.
But what if a party gets more seats via Erststimme than they should have? In that case we just start adding seats until the proportionality is maintained (those seats are referred to as Überhangs- und Ausgleichsmandate). That has lead to ballooning parliaments with our national parliament the Bundestag (small pronunciation guide: Bundes-tag not Bunde-stag - compound words can be tricky) being one of the biggest, right behind China. Recent reforms should curb that. We’ll see next year how well they work.
Here is the (non final) result for anyone to lazy to check themselves:
Scheiße
So it’s still a minority by a significant amount. It could be much worse.
With how absolutely entrenched the CDU is in our political system, this is about as bad as you could reasonably expect it to be. The CDU is an overall incredibly dominant party and the others are often competing for second place, which the AFD has gotten now. Them actually competing on that level is frankly terrifying.
The long term strategy is to destabilise the CDU by forcing them into unfavorable coalitions. Which they have probably achieved this time. If the CDU looks bad enough in 5 years the AfD might get enough votes so that no government can be built without them
Is this projection only from exit polls or the actual count?
Also how does the whole ‘two votes’ thing work - from what I understand you have one vote that’s basically a singe transferable vote type and another for your local electorate that’s proportional representation (but I’m not sure what counting system is used)
I don’t know exactly how their electoral system works but the baseline in Germany is mixed member proportional. That is, you have a FPTP vote for a district seat, and also a proportional vote. If parties get less district seats than their proportional result, members are added to parliament from party lists until the proportions work out.
I don’t think STV is used anywhere, the FPTP portion is kept in check by the proportional thing anyway. When things are more complicated than baseline mixed member proportional it generally has to do with voters being able to re-arrange people on the party lists.
It’s projected from the actual (then still unfinished) count but I think it uses some data from the exit polls to fill in the gap. So both?
We now have a preliminary official result. You can see it here: Saxony, Thuringia
@barsoap@lemm.ee has explained the basics of our electoral system pretty well: The first vote (Erststimme) is towards a candidate in a FPTP system to represent an electoral district and the second vote (Zweitstimme) for a party in a closed list proportional representative system. A party nominates a bunch of candidates and ranks them on a list. If they get enough votes to get a certain number of seats then those get filled first with candidates elected by Erststimme and then with candidates from the list starting at the top.
A party needs to win at least 5% of the Zweitstimme or win at least 3 seats using the Erststimme to be awarded any seats. This was done as a lesson from Weimar Germany where too many small parties made coalition building impossible which helped Hitlers rise to power.
But what if a party gets more seats via Erststimme than they should have? In that case we just start adding seats until the proportionality is maintained (those seats are referred to as Überhangs- und Ausgleichsmandate). That has lead to ballooning parliaments with our national parliament the Bundestag (small pronunciation guide: Bundes-tag not Bunde-stag - compound words can be tricky) being one of the biggest, right behind China. Recent reforms should curb that. We’ll see next year how well they work.