Germany and Japan both have new prime ministers. The German election results by geography are below (see here and here).
Black is Christian Democratic Union. Red is Social Democrat. Blue is the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany), and Green is, of course, the Green party. I'm not sure what yellow stands for on this map, but it is probably for the Free Liberals, a pro-business libertarian leaning party.
The blue area corresponds, fairly well, with the historical Kingdom of Saxony and some of the neighboring former Thuringian States.
The Social Democrat-Christian Democrat divide largely reflects the Protestant-Catholic divide in Germany (as well as secular East Germany). Green Party supporters are found in the urban centers.
The maps below break down Germany by religion as Catholic (red), Protestant (blue), and Atheist/Other (Green):
German elections have left the shape of the next ruling coalition government unclear. As a commentator at the Washington Post explains:
The Social Democrats (SPD) just edged ahead with 25.7 percent of the vote, marginally ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, which fell to 24 percent, a historic low for the party.... With Merkel’s departure, it will fall to one of the two main parties to provide a successor. This will either be Armin Laschet, who leads Merkel’s party, or the SPD’s Olaf Scholz, who has served as Merkel’s finance minister and vice chancellor as his party has run the country together with Merkel’s since 2013. Neither of the two candidates is a revolutionary on a ticket of rapid change, but both understand that absolute continuity from Merkel’s middle-of-the-road politics is no longer tenable. Germans want change, but they also want the change to be handled well and securely.... The Greens reached 14.8 percent and the Free Liberals (FDP) 11.5 percent, and both are likely to act as kingmakers and form the body of a coalition led by other big parties. Yet, they are fundamentally opposed on many baseline issues. The libertarian principles of the FDP are structurally at odds with the deep, state-driven changes the Greens want to make to decarbonize the German economy at a fast pace. There is no lowest common denominator and stagnation threatens unless one or the other makes significant concessions.
Parties that get less than 5% of the vote don't get representatives in the parliament. A New York Times report notes that:
The progressive, environmentalist Greens appeared to make significant gains since the 2017 election but seemed to fall short of having a viable shot at the chancellery. That positions the Greens, as well as the business-friendly Free Democrats, to join the next government. They will play a key role in deciding what the next German government could look like, depending on which of the larger parties they would like to govern with.
On the outer edge of the political spectrum, support for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, appeared roughly unchanged, while the Left party appeared to be hovering on the 5 percent threshold needed to win seats in Parliament.
2 comments:
Unsurprising, to me at least, that Greens are an urban party. Urbanites, in my experience, view nature as an extension of an urban park, either well or poorly managed by the local government, trees neatly arranged by human planning, few and sad-looking animals, always on the brink of a garbage catastrophe if pickup is even a day late.
The phrase 'flyover country' captures this thinking. Fly from one urban desert to another, missing all the green in between. Maybe visit the occasional national park, seeing it through the urban lens as something human-managed and planned.
Not saying the smarter ones don't understand this mental model and try to see past it, but I believe many can't or don't.
By extension, this also explains part of the urban-exurban political patterns in the recent US. Dems live in densely populated places with severe human problems, and see a need for a strong central power to manage them. Reps tend to be in less dense places, where problems are more obviously caused by oneself, or easily specified other individuals. We project our mental models onto the wider world. Not surprising things don't work out as we might have expected.
@Tom
This isn't an implausible hypothesis and is an appealing explanation, although the empirical evidence out there tends to favor a more crass explanation for the most part (greater economic productivity is associated with higher population density which is associated with liberal/secular views, plus migration, mostly), as I explored in a lengthy answer at Politics.StackExchange about a month ago with lots of charts. See https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/68576/why-are-democrats-more-geographically-clustered/68578#68578
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