Michael Moore gives us a thoughtful article about Joschka Fischer (and some priceless Fischer anecdotes) in Slate today. Before going any farther I should make clear that I refer not to the notoriously fat filmmaker but to Michael Scott Moore, an American novelist living in Berlin. Of his fatness or otherwise I am entirely ignorant.
Author Archives: Mrs Tilton
Show your love
You will all remember the Satin Pajama awards with great fondness, I trust. Lots of new blogs for everybody, staggeringly opulent prizes for the favoured few, and a juicy whiff of scandal into the bargain — good clean fun for the whole family.
Well, if you like that sort of thing, you’ll want to check out this year’s Koufax awards at the Wampum website. Unlike the Satin Pajamas, the Koufax awards are American, and unabashedly leftist1. But they will introduce you to some terrific writing, and your blogroll will be the better for it.
Here’s the thing, though: in America, bandwidth (like quality health care or influence over Republican politicians) apparently costs money. And because they are feckless socialist layabouts, the Wampumites aren’t showered with bushels of sweet, sweet cash from Richard Mellon Scaife and his like. So if you want to help them spread embittered Marxist-Leninist falsehoods, you should send them some money. PayPal and Amazon make this easy and painless. Or, if you prefer, you can send big chests stuffed with pirate gold to their snail mail address.
Continue reading
Catastrophic success?
In one of his many excellent pieces in the run-up to the German election, Alex mentioned the phenomenon of ‘overhang mandates’. These are extra parliamentary seats that a party gains by winning more seats via one of German’s two electoral methods than by the other. This might seem odd enough. What’s even odder is that a party could lose a seat if too many people vote for it.
German electoral law is complex. In a comment to one of Tobias’s posts, Florian recommended the wahlrecht.de website as a good primer on how it works. He also mentioned examples of some of the electoral weirdnesses explained by wahlrecht.de. For example, did you know (asks Florian) that, under certain circumstances, a vote can have ‘negative weight’ — can reduce the parliamentary representation of the party for which it is cast?
Well, it can. And this conundrum is worth looking at closely, because right now it is more than a mere electoral curiosity. There is one electoral district in Germany, Dresden I, that has not yet voted. (Those who’ve been paying a perhaps unhealthy level of attention to the German elections will know that the death of a neonazi candidate has forced the delay of the election.) And in Dresden I, there is a very real chance that a local triumph of the CDU could cause the party to lose a seat in the national parliament. The reason? It’s those overhang mandates that Alex kept mentioning.
Excellent as wahlrecht.de is, it’s in German. Below the fold, then, is a summary explanation of how the CDU could lose a seat by gaining votes. For those who read German and are interested in that sort of thing, there are links to the relevant passages of the BWahlG (German Federal Electoral Act).
In the mean time, we should note that the possible ‘negative weight’ of CDU votes in Dresden I, though perverse and undemocratic, would not affect the overall results in Germany. Even if the CDU are ‘catastrophically successful’ in Dresden I, the Union will still have more seats than the SPD, albeit with a lead of only 2 rather than 3 MPs. The really perverse thing that could come out of the Dresden special election is this: CDU and SPD wind up with an equal number of seats. As the Spiegel explains, however, this is mathematically a possibility, but in real-world terms exceedingly unlikely. To achieve this result, the SPD would need to poll 91% of voters in the district, and every single eligible voter would have to vote.
Uncool runnings
It’s a highly unlikely result, I’d think. And it’s one nobody had talked about before tonight. But I think I ought to mention it here, if only because its name is so cute.
Where to find the German election results
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.
Apparently 粗大塵 does not mean what I, judging by the context, had thought it means
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.
Continue reading
The results begin to harden
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.
First results
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.
Unwanted
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.
A little flutter
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.