German chancellor met some colorful constituents ahead of Sunday's German general election
Posted on 09/26/2021 12:02:06 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Polls indicate a close election
As Angela Merkel's conservatives slipped behind and the center-left Social Democrats, the chancellor was forced to break her pledge not to get involved in the election campaign. The CDU's Armin Laschet has played on fears of a swing to the left in his campaigning, and the gap narrowed in the final stretch.
The SPD's Olaf Scholz is eager to hold on to his lead, seeking to convince voters that he is the most credible successor to Merkel.
Meanwhile, the Greens are appealing to voters on the theme of climate change, but face the challenge of attracting older voters.
DW went to see how the parties were responding to polling ahead of the big day.
(Excerpt) Read more at dw.com ...
And who is going to replace the commie? Another commie.
seeking to convince voters that he is the most credible successor to Merkel.
The communist definition of "conservatives" means big social programs and flooding the nation with unskilled migrants that refuse to assimilate.
To put this into prospective...it’s not that more voters are voting for left-of-center SPD’s Scholz. 2017’s numbers for the SPD were around 24.5-percent and 2013’s numbers were around 25.7-percent. Polling over past month says that SPD’s Scholz will get around 25-percent, yet win.
The real story here...the CDU has lost 8 points off their 2013/2017 numbers and marginally carry 22-percent in this election.
No one is charged up or enthusiastic over the three top Chancellor candidates, and it shows. The public generally believes the recession will deepen, taxes will increase, and next coalition will make things less stable.
I should note, because of varying rules in play...the official number of Bundestag numbers (currently at 709 members) will go up over 900....possibly close to 1,000 members.
Before Merkel the Christian Democrats were a credible center-right party. I remember that in the 1990s they still opposed citizenship for the children of the Turkish “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter in German) born in Germany. Yes, it wasn’t wise to invite those guest workers in the first place, but at least they were openly saying that the guest workers and their children weren’t German and could be sent back to their country of origin at any time.
But aren’t the left-wing parties (the Social Democrats, the Greens and die Linke) as a whole stronger than they used to be? Aren’t the Social Democrats more willing to form a coalition with die Linke on the federal level?
The Christian Democrats moved left, like all political parties tend to do so they could keep the minor left parties from gaining too much power.
Yes, I remember the gastarbeiter discussion prior to re-unification with the east.
If you use the numbers of the 1980s....the SPD has dwindled down...the Linke are marginally going to take 6-percent of the vote down, and the Greens have consumed the unhappy SPD party folks (they sit at around 16 percent). This all adds up to 48-to-50 percent of the public vote.
What you have is a fifty-odd national topics that people are worried about and the various parties and news media hype the problems as though they can be resolved.
The housing cost issue in urban areas can’t be fixed. Crime can’t be resolved without more people going to prison. Teenagers are fixated on saving-the-world. Farmers are peeved over mounting regulations. Coal and nuke power are going to be taken down with questionable replacements and grid issues likely. The border isn’t secure. Covid is hyped every single evening on public news. Majority of people don’t believe the electrical car hype. Germans question the Afghanistan mess. Pro-EU people are fewer than five years ago. The list goes on and on....without much on resolutions.
On the coalition...some journalists suggest the SPD-Green-Like coalition will occur. If you stand around SPD enthusiasts...I’d say one in three don’t want this type of government...so it’ll be harder to form than people think. More likely that the Greens-FDP group will be brought to the SPD. It probably would trigger thousands to consider leaving Germany, if you did get a far-left coalition situation.
Bottom line: for all of Merkel’s sixteen years...there’s simply not anything remarkable or phenomenal that you can bring up. I tend to expect the SPD (likely winner) to follow the same script. For all that Merkel chatter on shutting the nuke/coal plants, we have yet to reach that end-stage and grid questions come weekly.
No matter how often this is repeated, it still doesn't make it so.
The fact is that the US pressured Germany to accept Turkish guest workers to prop up the Turkish economy - for cold war strategic reasons. The German ministry of economy was adamantly against this, for all the obvious reasons (the Turkish workers were not needed - plenty of Italians, Greek, etc. already there - and culturally incompatible). This was "overruled" by the foreign ministry to play along with US interests.
“Angela Merkel’s conservatives”
That’s an oxymoron. East Germany has no conservatives.
The German dude will win...I am placing my bet!
Bottom line: Western civilization continues its steady trajectory into the dust bin of history.
SPD 26. CDU 25. Green 15. FDP 11. AfD 10. Commies 5. As of 9Pm Germany time. No actual results. All exit polls . Polls closed for 3 hours.
Seats. 202-197-110-93-87-40
Der Linke ( ex E German Communists) at 4.6%. Need to be at 5% to get any proportional. 283 of 299 constituencies reporting. By my calculations they almost mathematically eliminated from getting to 5%. They will elect a handful in individual districts. The CDU will elect more reps in individual districts, but because people voting for a CDU rep voted FDP on th proportional basis, the SPD will defeat the CDU roughly 27-26%. On the proportional side. And we all thought the Canadians earlier this week had a mess
Dear fellow Freeper Moltke: yes, that is, unfortunately, true.
It occurred in 1961 - as you have been correctly pointing out - behind the background of the Cold War, which was about to reach another climax.
Still I’d like to play devil’s advocate here, and maintain that the Kennedy administration had no real clue about the Turks and what a problem they would become.
Furthermore, in the sixties, other European countries (Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium in ‘64, France in ‘65 and Sweden two years later) followed suit and began recruiting workers from Turkey, too.
I might be wrong, but the “treaties of worker recruitment” between those other nations and Turkey were implemented without any pressure from Washington, DC, as far as I know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turks_in_Europe
Still, it seems to me that the Sixties were generally an era of liberalization all over the free world, and that included international migration to a strong degree: Canada liberalized its immigration laws in 1962 to include non-Europeans, and Australia began admitting significant numbers of Asian immigrants even before the “White Australia” policy was officially ended in 1972.
And I think everybody on this forum knows about the infamous 1965 US immigration law and its effects... :-(
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