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Conservatives poised to win German election but far-right AfD doubles support
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Edit at the top: turns out, any party that is below 5% doesn't make it into the Bundestag, so the multiple leftist parties that fell below that 5% were waisted when it comes to getting seats. The country though still has the majority left leaning vote percentage wise. I'm only keeping the original comment for posterity, some of it is wrong as has been pointed out by the Germans in the thread.
Interestingly, if all the center-left and the leftists parties all added up their percentages of the vote, they get roughly 51.2% of the vote. Now I'm not super knowledgeable on how that affects their Bundestag, but if that means that said 51.2 percent have a majority of seats, they could join together to make a coalition government and keep the far right out of power.
Course that won't happen because us leftists love infighting and refusing to compromise with our fellow leftists for the greater good while the right easily falls in line.
Also interestingly, this could mean that the far right/conservative party is going to be put into power in Germany winning the minority of the vote overall for the second time that I know of. And we all know what happened last time.
Edit: And again, this is all preliminary so it could change and as another commenter mentioned the AfD is a pariah and is still unlikely to be a part of the government due to the conservatives saying they won't be. But who knows, people lie.
Well said. Just a nitpick, of the two bigger parties (ignoring anything <3% here) which didn’t succeed in entering parliament, one is starkly not leftist (FDP, free democrats, i.e. “free market”), and the other is arguably financially left, but socially right (BSW, alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, a very young party that split off from the Left (the leftist party which made it into Bundestag) due to internal differences.
Bundestag. Only the building is called Reichstag, but we don't have a Reich anymore. And what matters is the number of seats. Since only parties above 5% make it in, Left parties do not have a majority.
Didn't know that, I'll edit the comment, thanks for the info!
Edit that I hope I made in time for you to see: does that mean that the parties that are under 5% are waisted votes? So does the percentage of vote total show that the country is majority left leaning but because so many voters voted for parties that didn't break 5 those voters won't be represented and the seats that would have gone to leftist parties if they had broken 5 will go to the center left party who did? Basically, is voting for parties who don't break 5 like Americans voting for Third parties, completely pointless?
It's not a great system honestly. Throwing away ~14% of votes (that is several million people) isn't very democratic. It's not entirely pointless, but at least having a main vote and one fallback vote if the main vote doesn't make 5% would reduce that number by a lot, without encouraging heavy fracturization of parties (while still remaining computationally feasible to count, which is a real problem with systems that fully remove strategic voting).
At least this time I'm happy that neither the libertarian car fetish party nor the tankie light party made it in, but systemically it's not great.
Those votes aren't wasted. They receive additional funding to bolster the party and their future campaigns. They are however unrepresentative which is a shame but good things take time.
Yes, those votes will not be represented in the parliament. It comes from the Weimar republic, which had a lot of small parties and was hard to govern as a result.
Not sure thrown away is the right word, a new party would never make it into parliament if people didn't vote for them.