by DoDo
Sun Sep 11th, 2005 at 02:00:00 PM EST
Jumping in for the regular German crew, with just one news: in two of the last four polls published, the combined conservative-(market-)liberal poll number has fallen back to the critical level where even the slight non-proportional slant of the German mixed election system (worth about 2%) won't give them majority in parliament.
Both the poll published by the generally neutral Infratest-Dimap last Friday and the one published by the CDU-close Emnid yesterday put CDU/CSU+FDP at 47.5%, while the percentage points of the other three, leftist future Parliament members SPD, Greens and Left Party combine to 49.5%.
(The also neutral Forschungsgruppe Wahlen has a leftist lead of only 48%:49%, the CDU-close Allensbach has 48.5%:48.8%.)
Update [2005-9-12 7:21:44 by DoDo]:
Today Forsa, the polling institute associated with SPD, released its latest:
CDU/CSU 42% (+-0)
SPD 35% (+1)
Greens 7% (+-0)
FDP 6% (+/-0)
Left Party 7% (-1%)
Hence the two blocks unchanged for this institute:
CDU/CSU+FDP 48%
SPD+Greens+Left Party 49%
Meanwhile, on Saturday, the Bundestagswahl 2005 site updated its prediction for direct mandates:
Legend:
strong/light color: certain/weak lead
blue: CDU/CSU lead
red: SPD lead
green: Greens lead (look at central district of Berlin)
purple: Left Party lead (look at East Berlin)
On the main page, there is the seat distribution prediction based on the above map, with the so-called overhang mandates in parantheses:
SPD 214 (4)
CDU/CSU 258 (5)
Greens 43
FDP 43
Left P. 49
Note that the non-PR advantage of the right, i.e. that in the overhang mandates, melted to just one seat.
Overhang mandate:
In the German system, each state has a certain number of election districts, but twice as many seats to be distributed among parties. Normally, the latter is done according to votes on party lists. That is, for example, if a party wins 40% of the vote and 2 direct mandates of five in a state with 10 seats, two more people drawn from the party list will enter parliament. However, when a party wins more direct mandates than its share in the list vote, the Parliament increases accordingly and the difference is called overhang mandate. I.e., if say a party wins all 5 direct mandates with 40% of the vote in a state with 10 seats to fill, there is one overhang.
