The German federal election results did not surprise much. What they do show though are the long term effects of geographic-demographic-political idiosyncrasies.
Here are the general election results for each party and the potential coalitions they could form in parliament to create a government. Voter participation was a still healthy 77%.
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Some explanations:
- The Social-democrats (SPD) are the left of center mainstream party. They won new voters from the other side of the center as well as from the left (Linke). Their candidate for chancellor, the centrist Olaf Scholz, will likely lead the next government.
- The Christian Union (CDU + the Bavarian CSU) are the right of center mainstream party. They lost due to several recent corruption scandals as well as for presenting the gaffe prone Armin Laschet as chancellor candidate.
- The Greens are, well, camouflage green as they are pro-NATO Atlanticists. A few month ago they were artificially hyped as potential leading party but deflated over unexplained exaggerations in their main candidate's vita and a too unrealistic environmental program.
- The FDP are economic liberals who are at times trending towards libertarian.
- The AFD are right to very right wing 'alternative' conservatives. There losses are due to their anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine positions.
- The Left (Linke) is nominally socialist. Over the last two years their leadership has emphasized 'wokeness' instead of socialism which led to a loss of their long term supporters.
The previous government under Chancellor Merkel was a black-red coalition of the Union parties and the Social-democrats.
The next government under a Chancellor Scholz will probably be a red-black coalition of the Social-democrats and the Union parties.
An alternative is a traffic light (Ampel) coalition of Social-democrats, Liberals and Greens.
Foreign policy wise the second one would likely be more Atlanticist and hawkish as the previous one as well as less stable.
Here now comes the more interesting observation. Each voter has had two votes. The first was for the direct candidate elected in each constituency / electoral district. There are 299 of these. The district candidate with the most votes wins a parliament seat. The second vote was for a party list. The party list votes are proportionally applied to each party to select parliament members from their ranked lists.
This map shows the results of the second votes in each district. The darker the color the higher was the share of the vote.
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It is obvious that Germany is not a politically uniform landscape. There are strong regional tendencies. The east and north are more Social-democratic territory. The south and some districts in the west are more Union black. Saxony in the south-east is the only area in which a majority voted for the right wing 'Alternative'. Some well off city center districts voted for the Greens.
What I find amazing is that these differences can be traced back through hundreds of years.
Compare the above map with this one from 1860 when Germany was still split into several kingdoms and principalities.
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(Germany has lost the Prussian parts east of the white north-south line (which I added) due to the second world war.)
The old Kingdom of Prussia is now Social-democratic territory. The Kingdom of Bavaria and its western neighbors are quite uniformly Union black. But most astonishing is how the former Kingdom of Saxony is, a hundred and sixty years later, still a quite special territory with its own political expression. I find it fascinating that such political borders, which had been nominally removed after the German unification in 1871, still exist today.
Another demographic feature explaining vote tendencies in Germany is religion.
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These are the shares of self-declared Catholic, Protestant and Atheist from a 2011 census. The Union-black election districts in Germany's west are majority Catholic while the more Protestant and Atheists areas have more Social-democratic voters. The effects of the reformation in the 1500s and the Thirty Years' War in the 1600s are still with us just as much as the more recent non-religious education in east Germany.
What can we learn from this?
Very localized historic experiences which root hundreds of years back are still having political effects in today's globalized world.
This is what neo-conservatives and regime changers forget when they claim that they can change countries and remake them in their own image. That will never work because the historic local context affects everything.