I read a piece a few hours ago suggesting that although the hard-right AfD did well in today's German election, they actually underperformed their polling. So I checked:
Not only did AfD not underperform, there wasn't a single party that differed from its final poll figure by more than one percentage point. That's good polling!
Now, I used the German YouGov poll for comparison to the final results, and there were other polls that had AfD at 22-23%. So I think you can safely say that AfD didn't exceed expectations. But most likely they didn't fall very short either.
POSTSCRIPT: Some of this has to do with whether endorsements from J.D. Vance and Elon Musk helped or hurt the AfD's cause. My read of the evidence is that it most likely had no effect one way or another.
Pick one's exit polls I guess? Or perhaps what Politico had circa 14:45 Pacific time on Feb 23rd: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/
wasn't up-to-date. It put it as:
CDU: 28.5%
AfD: 20.7%
SPD: 16.5%
Greens: 11.7%
"The Left": 8.7%
For some reason what they serve-up to the Internet Archive shows polls for the last year rather than exit polls? https://web.archive.org/web/20250222234028/https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/
My guess is Germans have higher social trust and more adherence to rule-following than the US, therefore they’re more likely to participate in polls and less likely to lie to pollsters. Doing either would feel “wrong” to Germans in ways that Americans just can’t relate.
I know it’s a stereotype, but … years ago, I worked on a project that involved handprint recognition, provided by the German firm with which my company partnered. The German team just assumed that users would print characters spaced according to tick marks on a form, and use fields in order on subsequent use, without skips. They were shocked when we showed them samples of the forms as filled out by Americans, in cursive, ignoring the tick marks, single entries scrawled over multiple fields, subsequent entries scattered randomly, etc.
I wasn’t shocked, because I’m an American, but, because all my great-grandparents were born in Deutschland, I would never violate the rules myself!
Stereotype away. I'm almost entirely old Hanseatic League stock and my father was pure German; eleven years after moving to Chicago and I still wait for the walk signal. Or that pedietrian me waits for a green light, period. Chicago natives are shocked, shocked I say. Though at least most of them have the grace to be chastened when I reply that I'm modeling good behaviour for children if they ask why I'm doing something so clearly against the Chicagoan native's grain.
About twenty-four years ago my wife and I were in downtown Nashville waiting for the crosswalk light to change so we could cross one of the four-lane highways that cut through the city so we could get to the Ben and Jerry's shop on the other side. There was no traffic for a long spell (we are also very law-abiding, though of British ancestry). A group of people walked up and joined us. We all stood there stoically, silently waiting. I was about to say "here we stand like a bunch of Germans" when someone in the other group started speaking German.
Can still do a centrist coalition even with the Greens if they want to participate. Lock out extreme Right and Left
CDU needs SDP. Sure they could add the Greens, but the Greens alone are not enough, and if SDP are willing to form a coalition, the Greens are superfluous.
Exactly; and if The Greens were in a three-way, CDU/CSU would be outvoted in their own coalition. Not going to happen.
I imagine that they'd prefer to be in a two-party with The Greens, who at least are unreservedly "capitalist". But they are four and a half percent short.
How? Crossing out nine percent for Wagenknecht and the FDP just grosses everyone up by 13%. So CDU/CSU becomes 32.46%; AFD 23.57; SPD 18.79; the Greens 13.32%, and Die Linke 9.90.
So, yes, CDU/CSU + SPD could form a viable coalition with 51.25%. The Greens do not have enough. CSU/CSU + Greens is just 45.78%.
Merz is just going to have to get along with Scholz.
Given this polling accuracy is it meaningful that the right parties slightly underperformed their polling while the left parties slightly overperform it, and increasingly so the further left you look?
It's "hopeful" but completely inadequate. It will take both "Center-Left" parties to get to 50%, and Merz can't afford to be out-voted in his own coalition. The mierde has hit the air impeller for Germany.
There's no way that Merz can get a two-party coalition. Neither SPD nor the Greens got the requisite 22%, not even nearly. At least the FDP faces wipe-out; they deserve it for their cavalier dick move on the Debt Brake. These guys are supposed to be through and through anti-Putinists, and the US just stabbed NATO in the back. If there is EVER a time that the "Debt Brake" needs to be ignored, now is it. It's five-alarm fire time in Europe, and they need to suck it up and start turning those piles of French PU into Valentines for Vlad. (The one with no "y's").
This comment was wrong. I forgot to gross everyone up.
Better to look at seats in the Bundestag: CDU/CSU 208 + SPD 120 = 328 of total 630 seats, a majority. All constituencies have reported results, but still preliminary.
Initially, I was struck by the right wing getting 49%, roughly similar to here, and wondering how much attribution to give to new global media for this, but on second thought tonight the tilt right in Germany is greater (tho not deeper, more on conservative level).
This may be one of the last elections where we see that post-COVID inflation has caused political turbulence, less ideologically-driven then would seem, just ideologists seeing the discontent and trying to put their stamp on it, when it's really about bread and butter issues.
In Germany, you see the winning coalition is sober about the gains, and the challenge ahead, while here we have a bunch of incompetent drunks, all supremely hubristic that it's all about the border and gender, when that's really just the stamp they want to put on it, but there is a danger in pushing people to fast and far socially and culturally.
Where do you get 49%? AfD 20.8%. CDU/CSU may have shifted to a more restrictive position on immigration, but it remains centrist and pro-EU. FDP has been described as libertarian, but that is distinct from the ethnonationalism of AfD.
The winner leans right, that's what I'm going with.
“ POSTSCRIPT: Some of this has to do with whether endorsements from J.D. Vance and Elon Musk helped or hurt the AfD's cause. My read of the evidence is that it most likely had no effect one way or another.”
I believe Musk spent money once again on disinformation, and the lower turnout seen in East Germany may have had an impact on the gains made by the AfD. I sense that Trump’s revisionism on Rus-Ukr didn’t land well. Not sure how Vance’s speech hit with the public; it sure as hell pissed off party leadership.
Overall I feel that what held back the AfD was higher turnout in general (83% national, even if the Eastern area saw lower turnout than the West), combined with the parliamentarian system which gives voters the option of more than a binary race like in the USA.
It's a parody video about Germans but it doesn't punch down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeGjQHwpzJA&pp=ygUHI2RhYWhpbA%3D%3D
"What are the two most followed sports here in Germany?"
"Rules and Regulations" As well as other jokes about Germans being stereotyped as straightlaced but truthful citizens.