The city of Hamburg, which is also a state (province) on its own, had elections Sunday. As of noon PST (9:00PM Hamburg time) according to Oliver Das Gupta et al in SPD regiert allein - CDU stürzt ab Süddeutsche Zeitung 20.02.2011, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had won 48.6%, the Greens 11.2% (the Greens campaigns in Hamburg as the GAL, the Grün-Alternative Liste), and the Left Party 6.4%, for a "left" vote of 66.2%. The two coalition parties of Angela Merkel's national government, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) won 21.9& and 6.5%, respectively.
This is a report in German from ZDF:
According to the allocation of seats in the Landtag (state parliament, which is actually called the Bürgerschaft in Hamburg), this gives the SPD an absolute majority, so they can form a government without a coalition partner. The Landtags also select the members of the upper house of the national Parliament, so the election has direct implications for the national government.
But the trend from the previous election is drawing more immediate attention. This represented a decrease in the CDU's vote of almost 22%, and an increase for the SPD of 14.5%.
In journalist-speak, the SPD and Left parties are referred to as "workers' parties" (parties if the Arbeiterschaft, the working class). The SPD stopped officially defining itself as a "workers party" in the 1950s, but it is the main party supported by organized labor. The Left Party is the "postcommunist" successor party to the former East German Communist Party. It's still stronger in the eastern German states. But they wound up in the Hamburg election with the same number of seats as the FDP.
The FDP is the "liberal" party, in the sense that most of the world uses "liberal", i.e., enthusiasts for the so-called free-market economics, but also with a strong civil-liberties tradition. Both the CDU and Green parties are called "bourgeois" parties. The CDU is traditionally the party of big capital, so the "bourgeois" label makes obvious sense for them. But "bourgeois" as it's used in German (Bürger, bürgerlich) can mean not only "capitalist" but "citizen", the latter with kind of a sense of the "respectable citizen". Which is, I suppose, why the Green Party gets the label reflecting the fact it draws a lot of urban professional voters. Because the Green Party is more "left" by almost any measure than the SPD.
The SPD in the 1990s embraced the tenets of neoliberalism. But never to the extent that we've seen with the Democratic Party in the United States, especially under the Obama Administration. More recently, the SPD as a coalition partner at the national level with the CDU supported raising the retirement age to 67.
Still, it's probably not overreaching to speculate that a 66% vote is in some part a rejection of the austerity policies of Merkel's CDU-FDP national government. If the SPD formed a coalition with the Greens and the Left Party - which they won't - they would have more than a two-thirds majority of the seats in the Hamburg Landtag.
On the other hand, Thomas Darnstädt argues in Ich oder ich Spiegel Online 20.02.2011 that the Hamburg election should not be read as reflecting some kind of national trend. He argues that not only is Hamburg SPD Party leader Olaf Scholz a fairly colorless leader. But his election themes were "nahezu wortgleich dasselbe, was bei der vorangegangenen Wahl die CDU versprochen hatte: Hafen ausbauen, Haushalt konsolidieren, Schulen verbessern, Gewaltkriminalität bekämpfen" (almost word-for-word the same that the CDU promised in the previous election: build up the ports, consolidate the budget, improve the schools, fight violent crime). Darnstädt concedes that Scholz has "a nice smile." In short, Darnstädt thinks Scholz is an empty suit.
In addition, the outgoing CDU-headed Hamburg government was a coalition of the CDU and the Greens. But the Greens gained votes, so it was pretty clearly a rejection of the CDU. Although, as Darnstädt notes, the Hamburg voters last year voted down a school reform advocated by the Greens.
Tags: deutsche politik, german politics, hamburg
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