Dear folks! Here's some remarkable observations from today's elections for German parliament.
- Both major factions (Social Democrats SPD vs. Christian Democrats CDU + Christian Socialists CSU) have lost many votes compared to the 2002 elections and are now, according to the last prognoses, very close (34.2% vs. 35% of the vote). Nevertheless, both their candidates for office of chancellor (Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel) have declared already that they consider the vote a clear mandate for the respective party. - Traditionally, the largest faction in parliament tries to build a coalition to elect their candidate for chancellor. At the moment, this seems to be the CDU/CSU faction. However, because CDU and CSU are actually two parties with independent programs, the SPD now argues that the chancellor should be the candidate from the largest *party*, which at the moment is the SPD. - The new German parliament will consist of five factions: SPD and CDU/CDU with somewhat more than one third of the seats each, and Free Democrats (FDP), Greens, and Leftists with about 10% of the seats each. It is not clear how these five factions fit into a one- or two-dimensional political sprectrum, so there are a large number of technically possible and politically not a priori unthinkable coalitions. Technically, there are seven possible *critical* coalitions (critical coalition = subset of the set of factions which has a majority of the seats but no strict subset has a majority of the seats), of which only three seem unthinkable, leaving as possible critical coalitions the following four: CDU/CSU+SPD CDU/CSU+Greens+FDP SPD+Greens+FDP SPD+Greens+Leftists (some consider this also unthinkable) Following Banzhaf, this would mean that the factions which build the current government, SPD and Greens, each still have the most power: SPD and Greens each belong to 3 possible critical coalitions, CDU/CSU and FDP each belong to only 2 possible critical coalitions. The Leftists belong to only 1 possible critical coalition. Yours, Jobst ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
