I am forcing myself to write today after the ongoing wave of horrendous news, millions of people in Puerto Rico threatened with death and disease, 9 million children having lost their health insurance this weekend when congress let CHIP lapse, and now, of course, the mass murder in Nevada.  So I am compromising: I will post some statistics today on the German election, and leave the harder part – the analyses – for later.

The table below (source: Spiegel.de) shows Merkel’s CDU on top, the social democrats next, then 2 leftist parties; the FDP is a deregulatory party of upper middle class business interests which came back into parliament; the AfD, Alternative for Germany, is the far-rift populist party that garnered almost 13% of the votes, bringing neo-nazi paroles, anti-immigrant, nationalistic sentiments into the government for the first time since WW II. The rest did not make it – note that we have 6 parties who will share in governing, and 42 parties that wanted to get votes. 61,5 million people were asked to vote.

The traditional big parties lost heavily; Merkel will only be able to find a majority vote in a coalition, which will no longer include the social democrats; they, after years of governing with her, now feel the need to regroup in opposition. The coalition that is discussed is nicknamed Jamaica for the assigned colors of the triad: Black (CDU), Green (the greens) and Yellow (FDP). Much talk about the curse of the caribbean (and not only in one of Germany’s most respected weekly’s.) 

The distribution of votes differed, as to be expected, according to region, but the percentages were astounding when you look where the AdD was elected – the further East you go, the more they scored, up to almost 36% in some of the districts.

Men are over-represented in AfD voters, as are middle-to low education groups, workers and the unemployed. Of the three million people who voted for the first time, the AfD also got a larger than expected share. And so they went from zero representation to 94 seats in parliament with the representatives on average being much more educated than those who voted for them and on the whole middle-aged white men.

Photographs (2013) today are from a small town East of the border that divided East and West for so many years, Salzwedel, in the state of Sachsen-Anhalt. The city is part of the Hanseatic League, the trading and seafaring conglomerate of yore, which always meant a bit more openness for the world. Its election results (district Altmark) mirror the average for Germany in %, with the exception that die Linke and the social democrats both got 19%; the CDU won, but lost almost 10 point compared to 2013, and the AfD scored 16.5%. It is a region that has been economically not as depressed as areas further to the East, and large gas reserves were recently discovered, promising some economic gain. (You can see how nicely the old house have been restored, for the most part.)

Sachsen-Anhalt, home to 2.277 million Germans, has about 9000 registered refugees. 80% of the citizens do not belong to a religious group, potentially a long lasting effect of GDR ideology condemning churches. About 16% are registered Christians, mostly protestant; in 2016 there where 1340 Jews (down from 1800 10 years earlier) who belonged to synagoges, so 0.06 % of the state population.There are no state numbers for Muslims; for Germany as a whole estimates are that  they comprise around 5.4 % of the population.

http://www.mdr.de/sachsen-anhalt/religionen-in-sachsen-anhalt-100.html

Karl Marx’ wife Jenny was born and is remembered here:

 

And if you think it all looks picturesque and romantic, think again.  The link below details some of the positions of those AfD representatives who got elected, Martin Reichardt for Sachsen-Anhalt. Read it and weep.

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-1.813852

Or join the resistance:

(Nazis f…k off, this is our home.)