Very interestn’ing , yes!
Also, @Livvy , cheers for that article on BSW and Wagenknecht seeking to challenge the election result. I skimmed it with my truly awful German.
I want to ask you Germans, who are inside the German media landscape unlike me. Is it seen as a risk that she and BSW will actually succeed ? Or is it mostly just a “we should have won and we are pissed off and we will get as much media attention as possible to how we should have made 5%” ?
These results make an coalition between SPD, CDU/CSU and the Greens look the most likely, isn’t it?
Difficult as the FDP have not made it into the Bundestag, polling <5%.
Yeah, I meant the above. Good riddance as far as the FDP are concerned.
No, the BSW is I think roughly 13k votes short of the 5% threshold, therefore Merz has just escaped his nightmare and a Grand Coalition is possible and the Greens are not needed.
Legal challenge of the BSW notwithstanding.
Yeah there is a majority with the two big parties and I expect they will go down that route. Hopefully it can last.
We haven’t heard anything concrete yet, just speculation and reports that they are considering a lawsuit. But I wouldn’t rule anything out, we also had problems with ballot papers in a constituency in Berlin at the last election and the constitutional court decided that a repeat election had to take place in this district.
Grand Coalition is just SPD and CDU/CSU, right?
Yes. More of a term still based on tradition/history than actual facts at this point. I mean they just barely get a majority together these days.
BSW, FDP, and other together polled nearly 14% votes but didn’t get any seat. That’s a lot of votes wasted.
Btw, this is one of the most important issues going forward imo. Merz can talk a lot, but without the finances/money most things in politics don’t mean much:
I don’t know how it works, in terms of percentage it is not 50% but according to projected seats it seems that CDU and SPD alone can form a coalition government?
Assuming that BSW’s appeal comes to nothing, that remain the case.
Theoretically you can have a minority government, but that is rather unstable, so it will be 50%+ of the seats.
Of course, the coalition has to be agreed and there will usually be some give-and-take as to which policies from each party are in the government programme.
Genuinely, why don’t you just look it up yourself? It’s not hard, even Wikipedia has a good explanation. I’ve even linked it for you now.
The short answer is, the percentages you’re looking at are the vote shares, not the seats.
Oh I am really sorry to trouble you. So much gratitude for your link.
Do you know how the votes are physically counted? Is it by hand or are there electronic devices?
I once volunteered for electoral duty in Scotland. I was just working at the polling station, but I did get to see the count. It is a very manual and laborious task and the main cause of errors is the repetitive nature of the task. They have different people to check the piles of votes and they are also weighed to spot any errors.
This is weirdly close to the US debt limit, which the GOP has had a ritual trench fight over many times since the Clinton Administration - but now want to do away with.