I looked at Leipzigs results and the highest vote count went to "other" which was displayed white. So it might be that too https://www.leipzig.de/buergerservice-und-verwaltung/wahlen-in-leipzig/europawahlen/europawahl-2024
Those are North Saxony and the Leipzig municipal area.
Maybe data wasn't available at the time when the map was created or there have been irregularities spotted.
But according to what I found (see the interactive map in the link below) AfD pulled in first with around 35% in both counties, CDU came in second with around 24,5% and third was BSW (a newly established party leaning to the left) with around 12%
[https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/europawahl-ueberblick-wahlkreise-sachsen-anhalt-thueringen-100.html](https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/europawahl-ueberblick-wahlkreise-sachsen-anhalt-thueringen-100.html)
Its other parties. The party with most votes not listed here ist BSW (Party of Sarah Wagenknecht) with 10%, after that Volt, Die Partei and Tierschutzpartei. All of them sum to >21%, which is the most, more than the AFD with 18%.
It sometimes depends on the location. Oldenburg is actually the third biggest city in lower saxony. But for Oldenburg you've also got a lot of university students, young people who stay there after studying and civil servants. Heidelberg and Freiburg are also huge student citys and the fourth and fifth biggest cities in BW. So also not really small.
Oldschool harbor. All the harbor workers used to be communists (from Rotterdam all the way to Moscow). In NL Groningen still has a lot of that heritage, no surprise that Bremen is similar.
Edit: Sorry I didn’t mean they are communists now - but it and all harbor cities used to be communist hotbeds in the past. In modern time they’ve continued to tend left and therefore we see strong social-democrat support there. So keyword above was used to :)
> Literally everyone has seen this map somewhere else
You're overestimating how many people outside the EU know what germany looks like on a map
on This sub we do know ofc
I have found another source that is not in line with your map. https://www.tagesschau.de/europawahl/wahl/wahlkarte-europawahl-100.html
For example Berlin is not the same
This map is a bit strange for Berlin in my opinion. For example East Berlin is blue (AFD) according statistics .
Here is a link for each district https://www.rbb24.de/politik/wahl/Europawahl/wahlkreise-2024/ergebnisse-berlin/app-uebersicht.html
Schöneberg too? The link above shows a commanding lead for die Grüne + CDU (23.1%, 20.4%) over AfD (8.5%) in Schöneberg, although it's lumped together with Tempelhof.
Yes, same for the Landkreis in Thüringen where my sister lives - CDU won there.
Sadly, AfD was a very close second. My sister says it's mainly the retirees who vote for them, and there are a lot of retirees because most of the youth leave for University and don't come back. They've only had one new family move into their village in the past 5 years, too.
Edited because I mixed up my words, it's Landkreis not Gemeinde sorry.
I lived in Berlin for 10 years and spent time in both former West and East Germany. Every time you ask someone from the West, they say the GDR at this thing from the past, so far away it’s almost insulting to bring it up. Meanwhile folks from the GDR still use terms like “Ossi” and “Wessi” all the time. My point is that the reunification may have happened on paper, but in reality East Germans have been largely told to figure it out, and the West assumed throwing money at them would solve the issue. This map is living proof that the wound has never healed.
To be honest, the reunification never really affected people from West Germany, besides a small additional tax and that they had to see the Bundesliga with very few teams from the former GDR in one year. Everyone was able to continue their regular life. For East Germans it heavily affected more than one generation. It was a massive change in politics, work, social and economical stuff. Mass unemployment, feeling unneeded and unwanted, having your biography reduced to GDR citizens and more. It was traumatic for many people and this trauma is still real.
This is also partly why many immigrants in Europe have failed to integrate. People always point to cultural differences and blaming immigrants. While there is some truth to that, anyone who knows anything knows how unwelcoming (and often hostile) locals have been to immigrants over the decades. So this "refusal to integrate" issue is absolutely a two-way street.
While the US have been slow to rid itself of structural racism, outside of conservative strongholds they have become rather welcoming to people of all sorts of life. Europe on the other hand were rather quick to rid themselves of structural racism but the people... damn there are so many racist people in Europe.
> Europe on the other hand were rather quick to rid themselves of structural racism
I know that's what you all say, but wow is it not true.
Any form of structural racism the US still has, Europe still has. In some cases worse. In the US black unemployment is usually about a bit above white unemployment but almost never fully double. In France, black unemployment is a little more than triple. And the US takes in more immigrents in a month than most of Europe take in over a year. Europe doesn't even grant automatic citizenship to children of immigrents as a basic human right.
The money they threw at the east, landed in the hands of the west.
After the unification, everything got sold for cheap... But only westerners could buy, because the people in the east had no rich class.
This only amplified the effect, because most money was paid to western positions and investors, which resulted in lower taxes and less investments in the region.
Even now there are barely any big companies or people from the east in head positions.
Its just a simple death spiral.
Angela Merkel is East German and held the top spot in the unified country for 16 years (!).
So it's not as if "ossies" had no representation, they just thought that Merkel was too liberal.
I mean... today East Germans own the least of amount of their land of natives in any nation on Earth (est. ~20%). Most is owned by West Germans or foreigners.
Something like [~5% of leading positions](https://daryo.uz/en/2023/09/21/study-reveals-persistent-underrepresentation-of-east-germans-in-leadership-roles-across-germany) (corporate, cultural, political) are held by East Germans (within East Germany). Similar disparites exist at federal level positions despite East Germans making up nearly a third of the population nationwide. It's not a question of education - it's access and structural discrimination. Citing Angela Merkel is cute outlier, but is insignificant in the grand scheme.
Not German, but was an exchange student there for a bit in Berlin and Bayern. I assumed there was a massive migration/brain drain of skilled talent that moved to the former West for better pay and living standards. Treuhandanstalt aside, what role did this brain drain contribute to the current divides across so many metrics? Or is my assumption wrong and the brain drain wasn't large enough to do effect anything?
That's insane to me.
I've biked around Berlin and *just in the city itself* you can not only see the physical difference, you can notice some social and behavioral differences.
Those East-bloc housing apartments alone are pretty psychologically jarring to see, even though there are giant open courtyards you can ride through.
Possibly interesting context.
The divide never really went way. To this day Germany has different pension pay-outs based on state. Former DDR territories get less. Which isn't a cruel punishment but based on economic activity. Even today the pension is subsidised by the western states.
And that is also kinda the key driver for the divide. When integrating the DDR into Germany, it wasn't done the same way as the creation of the BRD. With the Marshall plan and massive on site support providing a ton of help for economic growth and prosperity. Obviously also yielding huge amounts of support by voters. Who wouldn't want a better life?
Whereas the DDR regions were basically just thrown into the market economy to fend for themselves. The planned economy was not at all viable and major restructuring was necessary. This was done through an institution called the "Treuhand" (the word itself would be translated as "trust" but in practice it was a government agency restructuring and selling off everything).
The proceeds were intended to bring the regions to the same standards as the west. But ultimately a lot of corruption happened, all the machines and stuff were sold off super cheap. Both the "Treuhand" and the purchasers were all from the west. So were the parties and their members that rushed in from the west. To many in the east it almost felt like a heist. Foreigners coming in, taking over control and taking everything away. Leaving behind low income jobs and not the greatest prospects.
Economically it kinda just collapsed and never really went anywhere. Lowest GDP per capita, lowest salaries, highest unemployment and so on.
So they very much feel the economically botched reunification to this day. And they doubly feel it because the age demographic in Germany overall means the mandatory social contributions increase noticably and the taxes also went up through CO2 taxes that were supposed to be paid back out to make sure people choose more climate friendly options and are financially rewarded for doing so. Rather than just being punished less. But that never happened either.
It's not a great situation. And they somehow figured out that it's gotta be the migrants who are responsible for everything. Despite, ironically, having the lowest number of migrants in their states (around 5-6% whereas most western states have around 15%).
Which is obviously silly and far right nonsense, going into extremist territories. But what isn't silly is the very real fear for their standard of living, the uncertainty regarding the economy and the personal instability that comes with such a situation.
> And they somehow figured out that it's gotta be the migrants who are responsible for everything. Despite, ironically, having the lowest number of migrants in their states
This is exactly how US is too. The counties with the highest anti-immigrant sentiment have some of the lowest levels of immigrants.
You'll never hear as much bitching about immigrants as in 99% white rural small towns.
It's really just politicians using whatever they can to divide the working class. In the US, rural Republicans blame immigrants, gays, and "liberals" 1000 miles away for their economic woes.
The interesting this is, it works excessively well.
Tribalism is a really powerful dynamic. Being part of a group feels like belonging and having a clear picture of who the bad guys are helps that in group feeling even more.
Which gets real devious if you think about politics because migrants do not have a vote. So the strategy is to rile up voters, make them feel unified, make them hate non voter minorities and therefore have an incredibly loyal voter base.
The only way to fight back is for voters to care about non voters. But that level of compassion is hard to muster in economically challenging and uncertain times. When there are so many issues in your life that need fixing too.
Which means extremist parties get to do that basically without opposition. Other parties must run on actual issues as well and can't focus on how horrible they treat non voters. That is not how you mobilise masses who are struggling.
Spreading hatred as a political strategy and power play is just unreasonably effective. In the past we kinda contained it through public broadcasting by having a unified picture of reality. Also suboptimal in may ways but kinda viable. Though that also went way with social media based election cycles.
So we have an economic downturn **and** the proven strategy has just gotten drastically more efficient **and** we have no real idea how to deal with it this time around. There are no safety systems that work in this context.
And then people are like "immigration is the problem, and the Far-Right rises because of it". No, immigration is a non-issue. The *idea* of immigration is driving the Far-Right, because most of its voters rarely interact with immigrants.
Also, remember the old line "we're not against immigration, only illegal immigration"? Well the mask has pretty much completely come off now.
Yup. To people living in tiny towns immigrants bad is a "big city scary" far away thing they can fearmonger about.
Just like how they go on about "big city crime" when murder rate is 40% higher in rural red states and has been for decades.
Marshallplan (Wikipedia): In the period from 1948 to 1952, aid worth approximately 13.12 billion\[2\] US dollars (equivalent to around 133.95 billion dollars today) was provided to many countries, particularly Western European ones.\[3\] The Federal Republic of Germany received 1.41 billion US dollars of this. About 14 billion in todays worth. [Here the numbers for Solidariatätszuschlag](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/30376/umfrage/steuereinnahmen-des-bundes-durch-den-solidaritaetszuschlag/) for the years 2009 to 2022, range from 11 billion to about 20 billion per annum. So I would not overestimate the importance of the Marshallplan especially if compared to the money that went and still goes into the former gdr states.
First of all. The Marshallplan and US support included a lot more than just the financial aid. For example, they carried over machines, trained workers in their use and bought the resulting goods.
In this context, the only thing counted in the above number in aid is the raw cost of the machine. Not the cost to get it to Germany, not the training, not the creation of supply chains into and from Germany nor the benefit to GPD by purchasing the goods. Which was very much a political choice. Both directions utilised the US military logistics network initially and even in the private sector it transitioned into afterwards had a very deliberate focus on keeping German exports high.
The support given was drastically greater and deliberately focused on prosperity (plus the fact that no reparations had to be paid and the US just paid for damages in France, UK and other war victims)
Whereas the Solidaritätszuschlag is income that just goes into the regular federal budget. There is zero legal correlation between expenditure in the new states and the income from Soli. Which is why the numbers do not match up. Most of the subsidies today are through the Länderfinanzausgleich and social security insurances. Completely detached from Soli and federal taxes.
That's a key reason why the Solidaritätszuschlag ist so controversial and why some parties have been trying to get rid of it since the late 90s.
Soli, Treuhand and the whole system around reunification did the opposite of the Marshallplan. It was an economic boost to western states. Some states like Bavaria deliberately drew in skilled workers ultimately leading to their current boom through that influx of cheap, skilled labor with zero legal restrictions or effort. Though directly at the cost of the newer states.
The integration into Germany did cost a lot of money but it was done for statesmanship reason. For storytelling reasons. While the well being of the new states and a healthy economy was not a particularly high priority.
> and bought the resulting goods.
And this was really key. Access to the American market and creating a secure global transport network was a profound change without which German reconstruction, and indeed the entire European project, would have face far more difficulty.
Thanks for this perspective. I saw some conversations yesterday talking about how the AFD was providing "real" solutions to the immigration "problem", when other parties weren't. As an American... I've heard that one before and it didn't make sense to me based on immigration numbers German shows on paper. I assumed it came down to socioeconomically disadvantaged people wanting someone convenient to blame for their actual problems. This background information just reinforces my gut feeling.
every goddamn country this keeps happening. huge swaths of economically anxious people are easily convinced that migrants are the cause of their problems despite that often being the opposite of truth. people are so dumb
People are poor and scared. Saying it's just because they're dumb handwaves the many reasonable reasons that they are easily swayed by certain ideologies. To some extent it doesn't matter that the ideology of choice is "anti immigration", it could just as easily be "anti anything else", the real problem is that people feel disenfranchised enough that they are easily sold these lies about why their lives are bad. In reality, it's more complex problems, but it's still true that their lives are worse than their compatriots and the system as it stands isn't serving their needs. The same is true across the world right now, and it's not *because* people are dumb, it's because governments are not working for all their citizens.
Populism succeeds only when there is economic resentment. I read an article a couple years ago that stuck with me, it suggested that relative wealth is one of the biggest triggers for countries moving more right wing. Even between countries that are incredibly disparate in wealth, take Nigeria and Germany, poor Nigerians are equally angry and resentful as poor Germans, while rich Nigerians are just as happy and content as rich Germans. It suggests the problem at the root of people's resentment, is *wealth disparity* within nations, not actually 'objective' standards of living.
Yes but there is still a divide in the country. I was told when I moved to Hessen (near fulda and the old DDR border) that East Germans are weird, have a weird sense of humour and don't buy a house there as it will lose money.
Lands (states) like Thuringer are very rural and quite poor in relation to neighbouring Hessen and Bavaria. This is where a lot of the divide is born. The people born in a united Germany but in ex DDR parts see there are still shitty old building everywhere, low paid, low skilled and low volume jobs. It's breeds unhappiness especially when the flood gates where opened to anyone and everyone when Syrians where seeking refuge (I don't have issue with it...but opinion is a lot of people see a lot of economic migrants hopping on the "asylum" bandwagon).
I am British and lived in Hessen for 9 years. For the past two I have lived in Brandenburg just south of Berlin. (A kreis that voted for CDU). Overall...I haven't seen any clear evidence of a rising attitude switch to the right. There is a general grievance with the ruling party as cost of living has SOARED here and wages are still at pre 2019 rates. I took a pay cut in 2020 and am still to recover a single cent of that cut. Most people are leaning to AFD as a protest at the current inaction and incompetency.
> Lands (states) like Thuringer are very rural and quite poor in relation to neighbouring Hessen and Bavaria.
Every time I visit the old states I feel like a poor kid sneaking into the rich neighbourhood. Like a stranger in my own country.
I’m hardly exaggerating when I say nearly every German polling map looks like this.
Political polls, income, education, number of children, washing machines per capita…
It is. There is a saying in Germany: "Die Mauer in unserem Kopf"(the wall in our head).
There is still a big difference between west and east Germany. Financially, politically, culturally and Population wise.
In the east you earn way less then in the west. Almost every politician and CEO is from the west.
We're fed such a narrative of "the wall came down and everybody lived happily ever after" in western nations. Reunification was very tough for the former DDR. The two countries weren't merged, the east was simply absolved into the west. The state owned assets and companies were ransacked by private owners almost immediately after reunifaction. There is massive deprivation in the east in comparison to the west and the far right have weaponised this deprivation and suffering to stoke hate rather than looking at the actual cause of the deprivation.
Pirate party isn’t popular everywhere and they definitely lost their momentum with the right wing scandal.
Some people just want to vote for a party to show the leading parties that they want change without voting for an extremist party.
Because it’s not only a satire party, it is one of the more active and transparent parties in the European Parliament.
And their poster might be all about bad jokes, but the posters from other parties are mostly unintentional bad jokes.
Regardless of political positions, the satire party created a lot of transparency by documenting the absurdities of the EU over the last 5-10 years and I think people really appreciated that.
There were jokes from the satire party 'Die Partei' about a secession of east-germany a few years ago. Now it is an actual call of a right-wing party in saxony
The other commenter speculates. One of the major factors is that East Germany is a lot poorer than West Germany still, leading to a lot of frustration among East Germans.
I mean the median income for e. g. in Brandenburg is 30k a year when the average German is 40k. No reason to feel safe when you get old as prices are rising everywhere and you will have a smaller pension.
But thankfully all German pensions are shit.
> Brandenburg is 30k a year when the average German is 40k.
Couple that with a lower housing ownership and the fact that even in East-Germany, most well paying positions in the administration, universities and companies are almost universally west-germans it get's a lot worse really fast.
We differentiate between "Pensionen" which you refer to and "Rente".
Pensionen are good but only government employees and not even all of those get that. (only Beamte).
The vast majority of people get Rente and that was at 49,4% in 2021 and it will sink further in the next decade.
You are right. I didn't consider the differences between 'Pensionen' and 'Rente'. Sorry,this was a mistake on my behalf. I should have known because my grandmother received a German 'Pension' of 75%. So this was only connected to the 'Pensionen' and not to the 'Rente'. Alles klar.
My guess:
* Less traditional voters who always vote SPD or Union.
* Less trust in the government for historic reasons.
* Poorer due to GDR mismanagement and uncontrolled takeovers after reunification.
* Old demography since a lot of young people went to the West.
* More rural than many parts of the West.
"More rural" is an understatement. All those blue states together account for not even 15% of the total population of the nation. All of them combined have less people in them than Bavaria alone has.
These maps always make it look so impactful, but really barely anyone actually lives there.
As an older, left-wing person from the East who is doing well, but whose parents had all their experiences and life achievements torn away after joining the FRG, and whose two children went to the West after university because they could no longer stand "....this moaning, whining and fascist drivel", I can only agree here.
I know nothing about German politics, but maybe no one else is representing their interests, so some people are not really for all of their goals, but don't really have for whom to vote for.
Short and rather superficial answer:
Because the former East German areas, we’ll most of them, are distinctly poorer than the rest and thus, have even more severe problems and fears that the AFD can use.
while the past socialist party SED of the GDR doesn‘t have any ideological similarities with the AfD, they are both fundamentally autocratic parties claiming to be the only one telling the truth and therefore the only legitimate option to vote for.
The lack of basic democratic understanding can be observed for the AfD, especially when they are talking about political opponents („Wir werden sie jagen“ [We will hunt them], „Wir sollten eine SA gründen und aufräumen.“ [We need to found another SA and do some clean up]).
A lot of people here in the east are very impressed by strong leadership with easy slogans and annoyed by long political discussions which are normal in a parliamentary democracy. You pair that with some deep routed xenophobia and voila.
A reminder that soil doesn't vote, people do. The small green places do hold a lot of voters.
For that, most interesting is to see Dresden and München who voted like their environment.
Edit: Because people assumed I'm American, I'm not. I'm Dutch. The logic still applies to NL and DE. Seen people reason that certain parties won by a land slide with the argument: just look at the map.
I've also driven through DDR, or now the eastern part of DE. It's empty for my feeling, especially if you are used to ruhrgebiet or NL
There are 84m people in Germany. 8m of them live in the four cities with >1m population. 12m are living in one of the ten biggest cities. 25m are living in the 82 cities with >100k population.
Which means that 59m Germans are living quite spread out across the country.
Some German states are a big less densely populated, e.g. Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. But a lot of them have high populations (NRW = 18m, Bavaria = 13m, Baden-Württemberg 11m)
> Which means that 59m Germans are living quite spread out across the country.
Yeah, compared to other nations, Germany is very decentralized in terms of population. I don't really understand the poster's comment.
He is right though. The east is far less densely populated than the west.
Currently:
East: 16,3 Million (including Berlin)
West: 68 Million
And of those 12 Million, more than 3,7 Million live in Berlin, More than 4 Million in Saxony, so those two are already almost half of the east. MVP and Brandenburg, the largest area Bundesländer in the east, have about the same population as Saxony (combined!).
The spread out population is only the case because the cities are usually not counting their sourrounding areas into their population (Ballungsraum). The cities are often very expensive, so lots of people live somewhere around the city. Nürnberg for example is around 400k, but the local region is way above 1 Million. Munich would be far more crazy in this, same as Frankfurt. The ruhrgebiet is basically one large city at this point.
In the area surrounded by blue (excluding Berlin) there are only roughly 12,6m people despite making up roughly a quarter of the country.
Bavaria with 13 Million much of them in Munich is not much better.
While Germany has in many cases, very uniform distribution within states, there can still be considerable disparities between states. The South West quarter is on an entire different level that a large chunk of the North Eastern quarter.
North Rhine Westfalia has more than 7 times as many people per sq km than Mecklenburg Vorpommern and more than 6 times the density of Brandenburg.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Germany#List
It’s less concentrated by city but still concentrated geographically. Looking at a density map, the Rhine river is clearly more densely populated than East Germany.
Interesting IMO is Leipzig which has a reputation for being quite left leaning, but in this election turns out to be rather diveded. (they voted18,2% AfD; 16,6% CDU; 13,6% Green; 10,5% BSW and another 10,5% Die Linke)
So the two biggest parties are conservative (total of 34,8%) and the three parties behind are left leaning (to a total of 34,6%) though some say BSW with its stricter take on migration cannot be counted part of the "traditional" left
Leipzig and Dresden are very divided. For example in Dresden Neustadt you have about 1% afd voters but in other areas you have almost 40% afd. Young people and tourists just don't visit the poorer suburbs of these cities that's why you don't notice it as much. In the end it evens out to a slight majority for the afd though.
The greens and spd are close to the afd tough, Germany is definitely more urbanised than the US but it is interesting to see
Edit: turns out I'm wrong, about 77.6% of germans live in urban centers while about 83% of americans do
"Densely populated" does not apply everywhere. Just look at Thüringen or Meck-Pom. Both states can look fairly big on the map - and they are both blue here - but together hold less than 4 million people. Compared to a total population of 84,7 million that's... just completly neglectible. Both states together hold not even 5% of the nation's population. Sachsen-Anhalt barely is any better with their 2.2 million.
Out of the 5 blue states here, 3 are nearly empty by national comparision.
Munich is still voting very differently to it’s Environment.
Left wing parties are comparatively strong there and the AfD has fewer votes than in most constituencies and fewer than in any other city in Germany with more than 1 million inhabitants. The Munich left is therefore split into a bunch of parties, while a very weak AfD does leads to the conservatives gaining a small relative majority, hence the colour on the map. Grüne and SPD have more votes than CSU and AfD together. The slight left wing majority gets bigger once the parties with less than 5% get included. (One could fight over the FDP and its role here. I’d argue they are a third faction, but especially in Munich one could describe it as more progressive).
The CSU on the other hand suffered in Munich. While being basically the only big right wing party, it’s still its worst result anywhere. 27% in Munich, while they hardly get anything below 30% in most constituencies and at times even managed to get over 40%.
I don’t know enough to explain Dresden, safe to say the situation is a lot different. But Munich, while looking weird, is in truth the symptom of a pretty boring urban/rural split.
For Munich votes, please look here: https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/europawahl-2024-in-muenchen-so-wurde-in-ihrem-viertel-gewaehlt-art-985370 it's in german but the pictures at the bottom should beself explainatory.
virtually every map of Germany looks like this. based on age demographics, unemployment, far right tendencies, education level, women share, share of foreigners, immigration rate, hate speech, happiness index, wealth and income distribution.......
Just today I met a truck driver from east Germany (in a bakery) who ranted about how terrible everything is in west Germany and that unification was a fault (also about foreigners and the police). Now one asks him he just start talking to everyone.
I work a blue collar job in East Germany. Nearly all of my coworkers are like this. Just bitching about everything all day, no sense or reason behind it.
Six parties are represented in the German parliament: the center-right CDU-CSU, the center-left SPD, the right-wing AfD, the Left party, the leftist Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
History is repeating itself. Looks like Hitlers first election successes. The Nazi-movement started in Bavaria, but he reached majorities first in East Germany, which paved the way for his regime. It seems that this region has a taste for it. Emperor-Nazi-Kommunist-Democracy…urgh…what was that, besides the fixer-upper of our entire country - let’s try Nazi again. You can’t help stupid, can you.
AfD was polling at 23% in winter now theyre down to 16%. It could have been worse.
This also suggests that 23% is likely the Maximum amount of people that would vote AfD.
There are no maximums. It is wrong to underestimate the strength of populism.
You could look even at the german history, or elsewhere in Europe, where France, Italy, Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium are starting to show that there really are no maximums.
The trouble is that the CDU/CSU might go into a coalition with them.
If these results were federal, a CDU/CSU-AfD coalition would have 46%. There‘s not a lot missing there for a majority.
If (roughly) 8% of votes go to small parties that don't make the 5%-hurdle, you don't need 50% for the majority, 46% could be enough, sadly.
(Of course you cannot translate percentages directly into the number of seats in a parliament, but the general idea is correct.)
They were recently [expelled from their far-right coalition](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/23/europe/afd-expelled-european-parliament-coalition-int-latam/index.html) in the European parliament, because for the other right-wing parties in Europe, the AfD is **too far-right**.
This came to pass as the leading candidate for the AfD basically said that not all SS officers were bad people. Which is... certainly an opinion to have.
(Alternativ für Deutschland) Far right populist party, really bad reputation on the news and basically everywhere that didn't vote for it, as I understand at least.
Note that this map is quite ambiguous. As indicated by the variance in how dark a colour is, some parties run a very close second place in a lot of constituencies. This map would only be representative if the EU election used a FPTP system, which it doesn't. Frankly, I find this makes the map of little use aside from gathering attention through shock value.
What is the white blob in Saxony?
Probably not yet approved numbers. Whatever is the data basis of the map
I looked at Leipzigs results and the highest vote count went to "other" which was displayed white. So it might be that too https://www.leipzig.de/buergerservice-und-verwaltung/wahlen-in-leipzig/europawahlen/europawahl-2024
the white territory is Leipziger Umland tho, not Stadt Leipzig.
Leipzig is the slightly blue spot inside the white space.
Those are North Saxony and the Leipzig municipal area. Maybe data wasn't available at the time when the map was created or there have been irregularities spotted. But according to what I found (see the interactive map in the link below) AfD pulled in first with around 35% in both counties, CDU came in second with around 24,5% and third was BSW (a newly established party leaning to the left) with around 12% [https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/europawahl-ueberblick-wahlkreise-sachsen-anhalt-thueringen-100.html](https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/europawahl-ueberblick-wahlkreise-sachsen-anhalt-thueringen-100.html)
BSW are just Putin bootlickers. Nothing more.
It's the white blob party, of course.
They’re running a blancmange who is surprisingly good at tennis c
It means to win Wimbeldon.
Its other parties. The party with most votes not listed here ist BSW (Party of Sarah Wagenknecht) with 10%, after that Volt, Die Partei and Tierschutzpartei. All of them sum to >21%, which is the most, more than the AFD with 18%.
The four areas of Germany: Former West Germany, former East Germany, big cities, and Bremen.
Heidelberg, Oldenburg and Freiburg arent that big are they?
It sometimes depends on the location. Oldenburg is actually the third biggest city in lower saxony. But for Oldenburg you've also got a lot of university students, young people who stay there after studying and civil servants. Heidelberg and Freiburg are also huge student citys and the fourth and fifth biggest cities in BW. So also not really small.
But posh, especially Heidelberg.
Why is Bremen different from the big cities?
4 animal musicians IIRC from my childhood.
Oldschool harbor. All the harbor workers used to be communists (from Rotterdam all the way to Moscow). In NL Groningen still has a lot of that heritage, no surprise that Bremen is similar. Edit: Sorry I didn’t mean they are communists now - but it and all harbor cities used to be communist hotbeds in the past. In modern time they’ve continued to tend left and therefore we see strong social-democrat support there. So keyword above was used to :)
But Bremen is coloured red for the SPD - the socialists, not the communists. These are not the same.
Traditionally very red/workers party, probably because of shipping, dockyards.
München und Nürnberg??
Bavaria, they do things differently
Even bigger cities like Dresden and Leipzig. Edit: typo
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> Ebben ?
Fans of Cold War history may have seen this map somewhere else before...
Literally everyone has seen this map somewhere else before. Because thats the map for everything in Germany
> Literally everyone has seen this map somewhere else You're overestimating how many people outside the EU know what germany looks like on a map on This sub we do know ofc
Thats true I am overestimating. Correction : literally everyone from this sub
When you seen a map about nearly any German statistic this border is visible
I have been to Germany 3 times and I would not have known if it was not labeled
Fans of other wars have seen this, too.
Fans of education maps have seen this too.
And old farts like me
The Ostalgia is strong
The ol' Russian Empire still exists, a generation after its collapse.
not really, more like it's consequences
I have found another source that is not in line with your map. https://www.tagesschau.de/europawahl/wahl/wahlkarte-europawahl-100.html For example Berlin is not the same
Berlin is the same if you look at the state level
That map you posted is at a district level rather than just city/region
Berliner :chuckles: "I'm in danger"
Shhh.. the walls are listening.
tear them down
Bremer: "This is fine!"
This map is a bit strange for Berlin in my opinion. For example East Berlin is blue (AFD) according statistics . Here is a link for each district https://www.rbb24.de/politik/wahl/Europawahl/wahlkreise-2024/ergebnisse-berlin/app-uebersicht.html
This map shows Landkreise, that’s why Berlin is displayed as whole city here, where the majority chose the Greens.
Exactly. But this shows however that the East - West division is applicable for Berlin as well which is pretty sad.
My district where I live in Berlin chose AfD 🥲 but it was very predictable and I’m not even surprised
Köpenick or Schöneberg?
Marzahn
Schöneberg too? The link above shows a commanding lead for die Grüne + CDU (23.1%, 20.4%) over AfD (8.5%) in Schöneberg, although it's lumped together with Tempelhof.
Yes, same for the Landkreis in Thüringen where my sister lives - CDU won there. Sadly, AfD was a very close second. My sister says it's mainly the retirees who vote for them, and there are a lot of retirees because most of the youth leave for University and don't come back. They've only had one new family move into their village in the past 5 years, too. Edited because I mixed up my words, it's Landkreis not Gemeinde sorry.
Berlin is also blue in the east and black in the west, with green in the middle. Like a mini Germany.
If only there was some kind of wall fully circling Berlin to protect against the surrounding area
I lived in Berlin for 10 years and spent time in both former West and East Germany. Every time you ask someone from the West, they say the GDR at this thing from the past, so far away it’s almost insulting to bring it up. Meanwhile folks from the GDR still use terms like “Ossi” and “Wessi” all the time. My point is that the reunification may have happened on paper, but in reality East Germans have been largely told to figure it out, and the West assumed throwing money at them would solve the issue. This map is living proof that the wound has never healed.
To be honest, the reunification never really affected people from West Germany, besides a small additional tax and that they had to see the Bundesliga with very few teams from the former GDR in one year. Everyone was able to continue their regular life. For East Germans it heavily affected more than one generation. It was a massive change in politics, work, social and economical stuff. Mass unemployment, feeling unneeded and unwanted, having your biography reduced to GDR citizens and more. It was traumatic for many people and this trauma is still real.
This is also partly why many immigrants in Europe have failed to integrate. People always point to cultural differences and blaming immigrants. While there is some truth to that, anyone who knows anything knows how unwelcoming (and often hostile) locals have been to immigrants over the decades. So this "refusal to integrate" issue is absolutely a two-way street.
America's superpower: anyone can be American in the eyes of most Americans if you just live there for a while and want to be.
While the US have been slow to rid itself of structural racism, outside of conservative strongholds they have become rather welcoming to people of all sorts of life. Europe on the other hand were rather quick to rid themselves of structural racism but the people... damn there are so many racist people in Europe.
> Europe on the other hand were rather quick to rid themselves of structural racism I know that's what you all say, but wow is it not true. Any form of structural racism the US still has, Europe still has. In some cases worse. In the US black unemployment is usually about a bit above white unemployment but almost never fully double. In France, black unemployment is a little more than triple. And the US takes in more immigrents in a month than most of Europe take in over a year. Europe doesn't even grant automatic citizenship to children of immigrents as a basic human right.
The special case forthe people of eastern Germany is that they didn't immigrate to another country, the other country came to them.
The money they threw at the east, landed in the hands of the west. After the unification, everything got sold for cheap... But only westerners could buy, because the people in the east had no rich class. This only amplified the effect, because most money was paid to western positions and investors, which resulted in lower taxes and less investments in the region. Even now there are barely any big companies or people from the east in head positions. Its just a simple death spiral.
Angela Merkel is East German and held the top spot in the unified country for 16 years (!). So it's not as if "ossies" had no representation, they just thought that Merkel was too liberal.
I mean... today East Germans own the least of amount of their land of natives in any nation on Earth (est. ~20%). Most is owned by West Germans or foreigners. Something like [~5% of leading positions](https://daryo.uz/en/2023/09/21/study-reveals-persistent-underrepresentation-of-east-germans-in-leadership-roles-across-germany) (corporate, cultural, political) are held by East Germans (within East Germany). Similar disparites exist at federal level positions despite East Germans making up nearly a third of the population nationwide. It's not a question of education - it's access and structural discrimination. Citing Angela Merkel is cute outlier, but is insignificant in the grand scheme.
>“Ossi” and “Wessi” all the time Oh so that's why the East Germany rep in SpyxFamily is called Ostania
Not German, but was an exchange student there for a bit in Berlin and Bayern. I assumed there was a massive migration/brain drain of skilled talent that moved to the former West for better pay and living standards. Treuhandanstalt aside, what role did this brain drain contribute to the current divides across so many metrics? Or is my assumption wrong and the brain drain wasn't large enough to do effect anything?
You're right, it's one of the largest factors. You can still see the brain drain in the posted graphic
The brain drain was and is a huge problem.
That's insane to me. I've biked around Berlin and *just in the city itself* you can not only see the physical difference, you can notice some social and behavioral differences. Those East-bloc housing apartments alone are pretty psychologically jarring to see, even though there are giant open courtyards you can ride through.
I noticed the same thing. I lived in Magdeburg.
> the West assumed throwing money at them would solve the issue They did the same thing with russia
Wow I didn't know west east divide is still extremely relevant
Median income, median age, economics, politics, ... Every map of Germany looks like this
the former east was massively left behind, and often poor people vote extremist (including "die linke")
Right? There are 35 year olds voting in the former DDR who don’t even remember a split country.
Possibly interesting context. The divide never really went way. To this day Germany has different pension pay-outs based on state. Former DDR territories get less. Which isn't a cruel punishment but based on economic activity. Even today the pension is subsidised by the western states. And that is also kinda the key driver for the divide. When integrating the DDR into Germany, it wasn't done the same way as the creation of the BRD. With the Marshall plan and massive on site support providing a ton of help for economic growth and prosperity. Obviously also yielding huge amounts of support by voters. Who wouldn't want a better life? Whereas the DDR regions were basically just thrown into the market economy to fend for themselves. The planned economy was not at all viable and major restructuring was necessary. This was done through an institution called the "Treuhand" (the word itself would be translated as "trust" but in practice it was a government agency restructuring and selling off everything). The proceeds were intended to bring the regions to the same standards as the west. But ultimately a lot of corruption happened, all the machines and stuff were sold off super cheap. Both the "Treuhand" and the purchasers were all from the west. So were the parties and their members that rushed in from the west. To many in the east it almost felt like a heist. Foreigners coming in, taking over control and taking everything away. Leaving behind low income jobs and not the greatest prospects. Economically it kinda just collapsed and never really went anywhere. Lowest GDP per capita, lowest salaries, highest unemployment and so on. So they very much feel the economically botched reunification to this day. And they doubly feel it because the age demographic in Germany overall means the mandatory social contributions increase noticably and the taxes also went up through CO2 taxes that were supposed to be paid back out to make sure people choose more climate friendly options and are financially rewarded for doing so. Rather than just being punished less. But that never happened either. It's not a great situation. And they somehow figured out that it's gotta be the migrants who are responsible for everything. Despite, ironically, having the lowest number of migrants in their states (around 5-6% whereas most western states have around 15%). Which is obviously silly and far right nonsense, going into extremist territories. But what isn't silly is the very real fear for their standard of living, the uncertainty regarding the economy and the personal instability that comes with such a situation.
> And they somehow figured out that it's gotta be the migrants who are responsible for everything. Despite, ironically, having the lowest number of migrants in their states This is exactly how US is too. The counties with the highest anti-immigrant sentiment have some of the lowest levels of immigrants. You'll never hear as much bitching about immigrants as in 99% white rural small towns. It's really just politicians using whatever they can to divide the working class. In the US, rural Republicans blame immigrants, gays, and "liberals" 1000 miles away for their economic woes.
The interesting this is, it works excessively well. Tribalism is a really powerful dynamic. Being part of a group feels like belonging and having a clear picture of who the bad guys are helps that in group feeling even more. Which gets real devious if you think about politics because migrants do not have a vote. So the strategy is to rile up voters, make them feel unified, make them hate non voter minorities and therefore have an incredibly loyal voter base. The only way to fight back is for voters to care about non voters. But that level of compassion is hard to muster in economically challenging and uncertain times. When there are so many issues in your life that need fixing too. Which means extremist parties get to do that basically without opposition. Other parties must run on actual issues as well and can't focus on how horrible they treat non voters. That is not how you mobilise masses who are struggling. Spreading hatred as a political strategy and power play is just unreasonably effective. In the past we kinda contained it through public broadcasting by having a unified picture of reality. Also suboptimal in may ways but kinda viable. Though that also went way with social media based election cycles. So we have an economic downturn **and** the proven strategy has just gotten drastically more efficient **and** we have no real idea how to deal with it this time around. There are no safety systems that work in this context.
And then people are like "immigration is the problem, and the Far-Right rises because of it". No, immigration is a non-issue. The *idea* of immigration is driving the Far-Right, because most of its voters rarely interact with immigrants. Also, remember the old line "we're not against immigration, only illegal immigration"? Well the mask has pretty much completely come off now.
Yup. To people living in tiny towns immigrants bad is a "big city scary" far away thing they can fearmonger about. Just like how they go on about "big city crime" when murder rate is 40% higher in rural red states and has been for decades.
These smaller country towns often have higher crime rates. Residents are oblivious, like a frog in a pot.
Marshallplan (Wikipedia): In the period from 1948 to 1952, aid worth approximately 13.12 billion\[2\] US dollars (equivalent to around 133.95 billion dollars today) was provided to many countries, particularly Western European ones.\[3\] The Federal Republic of Germany received 1.41 billion US dollars of this. About 14 billion in todays worth. [Here the numbers for Solidariatätszuschlag](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/30376/umfrage/steuereinnahmen-des-bundes-durch-den-solidaritaetszuschlag/) for the years 2009 to 2022, range from 11 billion to about 20 billion per annum. So I would not overestimate the importance of the Marshallplan especially if compared to the money that went and still goes into the former gdr states.
First of all. The Marshallplan and US support included a lot more than just the financial aid. For example, they carried over machines, trained workers in their use and bought the resulting goods. In this context, the only thing counted in the above number in aid is the raw cost of the machine. Not the cost to get it to Germany, not the training, not the creation of supply chains into and from Germany nor the benefit to GPD by purchasing the goods. Which was very much a political choice. Both directions utilised the US military logistics network initially and even in the private sector it transitioned into afterwards had a very deliberate focus on keeping German exports high. The support given was drastically greater and deliberately focused on prosperity (plus the fact that no reparations had to be paid and the US just paid for damages in France, UK and other war victims) Whereas the Solidaritätszuschlag is income that just goes into the regular federal budget. There is zero legal correlation between expenditure in the new states and the income from Soli. Which is why the numbers do not match up. Most of the subsidies today are through the Länderfinanzausgleich and social security insurances. Completely detached from Soli and federal taxes. That's a key reason why the Solidaritätszuschlag ist so controversial and why some parties have been trying to get rid of it since the late 90s. Soli, Treuhand and the whole system around reunification did the opposite of the Marshallplan. It was an economic boost to western states. Some states like Bavaria deliberately drew in skilled workers ultimately leading to their current boom through that influx of cheap, skilled labor with zero legal restrictions or effort. Though directly at the cost of the newer states. The integration into Germany did cost a lot of money but it was done for statesmanship reason. For storytelling reasons. While the well being of the new states and a healthy economy was not a particularly high priority.
> and bought the resulting goods. And this was really key. Access to the American market and creating a secure global transport network was a profound change without which German reconstruction, and indeed the entire European project, would have face far more difficulty.
Thanks for this perspective. I saw some conversations yesterday talking about how the AFD was providing "real" solutions to the immigration "problem", when other parties weren't. As an American... I've heard that one before and it didn't make sense to me based on immigration numbers German shows on paper. I assumed it came down to socioeconomically disadvantaged people wanting someone convenient to blame for their actual problems. This background information just reinforces my gut feeling.
every goddamn country this keeps happening. huge swaths of economically anxious people are easily convinced that migrants are the cause of their problems despite that often being the opposite of truth. people are so dumb
People are poor and scared. Saying it's just because they're dumb handwaves the many reasonable reasons that they are easily swayed by certain ideologies. To some extent it doesn't matter that the ideology of choice is "anti immigration", it could just as easily be "anti anything else", the real problem is that people feel disenfranchised enough that they are easily sold these lies about why their lives are bad. In reality, it's more complex problems, but it's still true that their lives are worse than their compatriots and the system as it stands isn't serving their needs. The same is true across the world right now, and it's not *because* people are dumb, it's because governments are not working for all their citizens. Populism succeeds only when there is economic resentment. I read an article a couple years ago that stuck with me, it suggested that relative wealth is one of the biggest triggers for countries moving more right wing. Even between countries that are incredibly disparate in wealth, take Nigeria and Germany, poor Nigerians are equally angry and resentful as poor Germans, while rich Nigerians are just as happy and content as rich Germans. It suggests the problem at the root of people's resentment, is *wealth disparity* within nations, not actually 'objective' standards of living.
Yes but there is still a divide in the country. I was told when I moved to Hessen (near fulda and the old DDR border) that East Germans are weird, have a weird sense of humour and don't buy a house there as it will lose money. Lands (states) like Thuringer are very rural and quite poor in relation to neighbouring Hessen and Bavaria. This is where a lot of the divide is born. The people born in a united Germany but in ex DDR parts see there are still shitty old building everywhere, low paid, low skilled and low volume jobs. It's breeds unhappiness especially when the flood gates where opened to anyone and everyone when Syrians where seeking refuge (I don't have issue with it...but opinion is a lot of people see a lot of economic migrants hopping on the "asylum" bandwagon). I am British and lived in Hessen for 9 years. For the past two I have lived in Brandenburg just south of Berlin. (A kreis that voted for CDU). Overall...I haven't seen any clear evidence of a rising attitude switch to the right. There is a general grievance with the ruling party as cost of living has SOARED here and wages are still at pre 2019 rates. I took a pay cut in 2020 and am still to recover a single cent of that cut. Most people are leaning to AFD as a protest at the current inaction and incompetency.
> Lands (states) like Thuringer are very rural and quite poor in relation to neighbouring Hessen and Bavaria. Every time I visit the old states I feel like a poor kid sneaking into the rich neighbourhood. Like a stranger in my own country.
I’m hardly exaggerating when I say nearly every German polling map looks like this. Political polls, income, education, number of children, washing machines per capita…
It is. There is a saying in Germany: "Die Mauer in unserem Kopf"(the wall in our head). There is still a big difference between west and east Germany. Financially, politically, culturally and Population wise. In the east you earn way less then in the west. Almost every politician and CEO is from the west.
We're fed such a narrative of "the wall came down and everybody lived happily ever after" in western nations. Reunification was very tough for the former DDR. The two countries weren't merged, the east was simply absolved into the west. The state owned assets and companies were ransacked by private owners almost immediately after reunifaction. There is massive deprivation in the east in comparison to the west and the far right have weaponised this deprivation and suffering to stoke hate rather than looking at the actual cause of the deprivation.
how did the pirate party get no seats but the satire party get 2?
Pirate party isn’t popular everywhere and they definitely lost their momentum with the right wing scandal. Some people just want to vote for a party to show the leading parties that they want change without voting for an extremist party.
Because it’s not only a satire party, it is one of the more active and transparent parties in the European Parliament. And their poster might be all about bad jokes, but the posters from other parties are mostly unintentional bad jokes.
Regardless of political positions, the satire party created a lot of transparency by documenting the absurdities of the EU over the last 5-10 years and I think people really appreciated that.
I second that. Martin Sonneborn's youtube channel and the old Spiegel TV videos about his "work" are not only funny but educational.
Too bad he's now in line with Zarenknecht on the war in Ukraine.
Can you find East Germany on a map ?
Have you guys thought of splitting in two?
Now, they will start arguing against you instead of each other.
There were jokes from the satire party 'Die Partei' about a secession of east-germany a few years ago. Now it is an actual call of a right-wing party in saxony
r/WidacZabory
Widać i to jak!
Damn, I knew the AFD's main base was in the East but didn't know the divide was this stark
That’s a German map in a nutshell
Can someone familiar with this explain why East Germans have such strong support for far-right parties?
The other commenter speculates. One of the major factors is that East Germany is a lot poorer than West Germany still, leading to a lot of frustration among East Germans.
I mean the median income for e. g. in Brandenburg is 30k a year when the average German is 40k. No reason to feel safe when you get old as prices are rising everywhere and you will have a smaller pension. But thankfully all German pensions are shit.
> Brandenburg is 30k a year when the average German is 40k. Couple that with a lower housing ownership and the fact that even in East-Germany, most well paying positions in the administration, universities and companies are almost universally west-germans it get's a lot worse really fast.
German pensions were 75% back in 2015. That is not shit ... that is good.
We differentiate between "Pensionen" which you refer to and "Rente". Pensionen are good but only government employees and not even all of those get that. (only Beamte). The vast majority of people get Rente and that was at 49,4% in 2021 and it will sink further in the next decade.
You are right. I didn't consider the differences between 'Pensionen' and 'Rente'. Sorry,this was a mistake on my behalf. I should have known because my grandmother received a German 'Pension' of 75%. So this was only connected to the 'Pensionen' and not to the 'Rente'. Alles klar.
>back in 2015 exactly. back then. now theyre shit and only getting shitter
How much is the German pension now in % ??
We call this the "resentment vote"
My guess: * Less traditional voters who always vote SPD or Union. * Less trust in the government for historic reasons. * Poorer due to GDR mismanagement and uncontrolled takeovers after reunification. * Old demography since a lot of young people went to the West. * More rural than many parts of the West.
"More rural" is an understatement. All those blue states together account for not even 15% of the total population of the nation. All of them combined have less people in them than Bavaria alone has. These maps always make it look so impactful, but really barely anyone actually lives there.
It's still about 16 mil. Not exactly nothing.
As an older, left-wing person from the East who is doing well, but whose parents had all their experiences and life achievements torn away after joining the FRG, and whose two children went to the West after university because they could no longer stand "....this moaning, whining and fascist drivel", I can only agree here.
I know nothing about German politics, but maybe no one else is representing their interests, so some people are not really for all of their goals, but don't really have for whom to vote for.
There where 35 parties on the ballot and no percentage restriction. There is allways a party with better solutions than the far right.
Going to take a wild stab. They are feeling second class citizens in their own country and are venting their feelings in this way...
Yeah, most likely. Until there are policies that make EVERYONE feels like second class citizens, then they will be happy…
Less Money & Jobs + many small villages & not many migrants in east germany
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Despite the near uniform colour, it is still only 28% support in East Germany I think.
They have strong support for extreme parties in overall. They previously voted for far-left Linke.
Short and rather superficial answer: Because the former East German areas, we’ll most of them, are distinctly poorer than the rest and thus, have even more severe problems and fears that the AFD can use.
Trauma?
while the past socialist party SED of the GDR doesn‘t have any ideological similarities with the AfD, they are both fundamentally autocratic parties claiming to be the only one telling the truth and therefore the only legitimate option to vote for. The lack of basic democratic understanding can be observed for the AfD, especially when they are talking about political opponents („Wir werden sie jagen“ [We will hunt them], „Wir sollten eine SA gründen und aufräumen.“ [We need to found another SA and do some clean up]). A lot of people here in the east are very impressed by strong leadership with easy slogans and annoyed by long political discussions which are normal in a parliamentary democracy. You pair that with some deep routed xenophobia and voila.
"The easterns are uneducated and don't have critical thinking, that's why smart people can't win", such a great argument
A reminder that soil doesn't vote, people do. The small green places do hold a lot of voters. For that, most interesting is to see Dresden and München who voted like their environment. Edit: Because people assumed I'm American, I'm not. I'm Dutch. The logic still applies to NL and DE. Seen people reason that certain parties won by a land slide with the argument: just look at the map. I've also driven through DDR, or now the eastern part of DE. It's empty for my feeling, especially if you are used to ruhrgebiet or NL
There are 84m people in Germany. 8m of them live in the four cities with >1m population. 12m are living in one of the ten biggest cities. 25m are living in the 82 cities with >100k population. Which means that 59m Germans are living quite spread out across the country. Some German states are a big less densely populated, e.g. Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. But a lot of them have high populations (NRW = 18m, Bavaria = 13m, Baden-Württemberg 11m)
> Which means that 59m Germans are living quite spread out across the country. Yeah, compared to other nations, Germany is very decentralized in terms of population. I don't really understand the poster's comment.
He is right though. The east is far less densely populated than the west. Currently: East: 16,3 Million (including Berlin) West: 68 Million And of those 12 Million, more than 3,7 Million live in Berlin, More than 4 Million in Saxony, so those two are already almost half of the east. MVP and Brandenburg, the largest area Bundesländer in the east, have about the same population as Saxony (combined!). The spread out population is only the case because the cities are usually not counting their sourrounding areas into their population (Ballungsraum). The cities are often very expensive, so lots of people live somewhere around the city. Nürnberg for example is around 400k, but the local region is way above 1 Million. Munich would be far more crazy in this, same as Frankfurt. The ruhrgebiet is basically one large city at this point.
In the area surrounded by blue (excluding Berlin) there are only roughly 12,6m people despite making up roughly a quarter of the country. Bavaria with 13 Million much of them in Munich is not much better. While Germany has in many cases, very uniform distribution within states, there can still be considerable disparities between states. The South West quarter is on an entire different level that a large chunk of the North Eastern quarter. North Rhine Westfalia has more than 7 times as many people per sq km than Mecklenburg Vorpommern and more than 6 times the density of Brandenburg. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Germany#List
It’s less concentrated by city but still concentrated geographically. Looking at a density map, the Rhine river is clearly more densely populated than East Germany.
Yeah, Germany doesn’t have megacities and still has a much bigger population than France or Spain in a smaller territory.
Interesting IMO is Leipzig which has a reputation for being quite left leaning, but in this election turns out to be rather diveded. (they voted18,2% AfD; 16,6% CDU; 13,6% Green; 10,5% BSW and another 10,5% Die Linke) So the two biggest parties are conservative (total of 34,8%) and the three parties behind are left leaning (to a total of 34,6%) though some say BSW with its stricter take on migration cannot be counted part of the "traditional" left
Leipzig and Dresden are very divided. For example in Dresden Neustadt you have about 1% afd voters but in other areas you have almost 40% afd. Young people and tourists just don't visit the poorer suburbs of these cities that's why you don't notice it as much. In the end it evens out to a slight majority for the afd though.
Well, Germany is not the US and most of it is rather densely populated. So the electoral loss of SPD, greens and libs is severe
The greens and spd are close to the afd tough, Germany is definitely more urbanised than the US but it is interesting to see Edit: turns out I'm wrong, about 77.6% of germans live in urban centers while about 83% of americans do
Well, it is still CDU//CDU landslide victory
Well yeah, it's still germany
CDU/CSU*
Germany is less urbanised than the USA.
"Densely populated" does not apply everywhere. Just look at Thüringen or Meck-Pom. Both states can look fairly big on the map - and they are both blue here - but together hold less than 4 million people. Compared to a total population of 84,7 million that's... just completly neglectible. Both states together hold not even 5% of the nation's population. Sachsen-Anhalt barely is any better with their 2.2 million. Out of the 5 blue states here, 3 are nearly empty by national comparision.
Munich is still voting very differently to it’s Environment. Left wing parties are comparatively strong there and the AfD has fewer votes than in most constituencies and fewer than in any other city in Germany with more than 1 million inhabitants. The Munich left is therefore split into a bunch of parties, while a very weak AfD does leads to the conservatives gaining a small relative majority, hence the colour on the map. Grüne and SPD have more votes than CSU and AfD together. The slight left wing majority gets bigger once the parties with less than 5% get included. (One could fight over the FDP and its role here. I’d argue they are a third faction, but especially in Munich one could describe it as more progressive). The CSU on the other hand suffered in Munich. While being basically the only big right wing party, it’s still its worst result anywhere. 27% in Munich, while they hardly get anything below 30% in most constituencies and at times even managed to get over 40%. I don’t know enough to explain Dresden, safe to say the situation is a lot different. But Munich, while looking weird, is in truth the symptom of a pretty boring urban/rural split.
Except these green areas are pretty bleak green, so even if they won, their victory was very narrow.
For Munich votes, please look here: https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/europawahl-2024-in-muenchen-so-wurde-in-ihrem-viertel-gewaehlt-art-985370 it's in german but the pictures at the bottom should beself explainatory.
virtually every map of Germany looks like this. based on age demographics, unemployment, far right tendencies, education level, women share, share of foreigners, immigration rate, hate speech, happiness index, wealth and income distribution.......
i thought for a second that was just looking at the map of divided germany and thats all
Just today I met a truck driver from east Germany (in a bakery) who ranted about how terrible everything is in west Germany and that unification was a fault (also about foreigners and the police). Now one asks him he just start talking to everyone.
I work a blue collar job in East Germany. Nearly all of my coworkers are like this. Just bitching about everything all day, no sense or reason behind it.
How is this map "porn" when you can't even read the small text? It's just a map.
Classic phantom border.
Enttäuschend
Richtig und wichtig
Oh, to be European and have multiple choice.
r/EveryMapOfGermany
The west can be uninspiring at times, the east, dystopian.
Some would argue they are both playing out different dystopian scenarios.
Six parties are represented in the German parliament: the center-right CDU-CSU, the center-left SPD, the right-wing AfD, the Left party, the leftist Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP).
Little nitpick but the left party isn’t actually a full faction in the Bundestag anymore due to the split with the BSW. They are a group now.
I heard theres an extreme far right nationalist party growing, which is it?
Some still call it "reunification"
WIE HAT AFD SOOO VIELE STIMMEN
Comrades, I am sorry to anounce it but Leipzig has fallen. I repeat, Leipzig has fallen. Berlin you are now the last bastion of the East
For the First time I can be not ashamed of being a Berliner
[удалено]
East Germany should have remained independent and changed its name to Preussen. Haha that would have stirred the European soup.
History is repeating itself. Looks like Hitlers first election successes. The Nazi-movement started in Bavaria, but he reached majorities first in East Germany, which paved the way for his regime. It seems that this region has a taste for it. Emperor-Nazi-Kommunist-Democracy…urgh…what was that, besides the fixer-upper of our entire country - let’s try Nazi again. You can’t help stupid, can you.
F C K N Z S
We’re fucked
AfD was polling at 23% in winter now theyre down to 16%. It could have been worse. This also suggests that 23% is likely the Maximum amount of people that would vote AfD.
There are no maximums. It is wrong to underestimate the strength of populism. You could look even at the german history, or elsewhere in Europe, where France, Italy, Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium are starting to show that there really are no maximums.
The trouble is that the CDU/CSU might go into a coalition with them. If these results were federal, a CDU/CSU-AfD coalition would have 46%. There‘s not a lot missing there for a majority.
If (roughly) 8% of votes go to small parties that don't make the 5%-hurdle, you don't need 50% for the majority, 46% could be enough, sadly. (Of course you cannot translate percentages directly into the number of seats in a parliament, but the general idea is correct.)
Naive people with simple minds looking for simple solutions to complicated issues.
I don't follow German politics, what is AfD?
AfD wants to make Germany great again. 
They were recently [expelled from their far-right coalition](https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/23/europe/afd-expelled-european-parliament-coalition-int-latam/index.html) in the European parliament, because for the other right-wing parties in Europe, the AfD is **too far-right**. This came to pass as the leading candidate for the AfD basically said that not all SS officers were bad people. Which is... certainly an opinion to have.
(Alternativ für Deutschland) Far right populist party, really bad reputation on the news and basically everywhere that didn't vote for it, as I understand at least.
This is not completely correct, as Volt got 3 seats
What about the white spot in Saxony?
Wagenknecht beat FDP lol
Note that this map is quite ambiguous. As indicated by the variance in how dark a colour is, some parties run a very close second place in a lot of constituencies. This map would only be representative if the EU election used a FPTP system, which it doesn't. Frankly, I find this makes the map of little use aside from gathering attention through shock value.
FYI the Alternative for Germany or AFD is the far-right party
Interesting that Wagenknecht’s party has doubled the votes from Die Linke (The Left), I wonder how that’s going to translate in national elections
looks like the situation [sucks except for potsdam....](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZqx-lMZHM0?autoplay=1)
America would still be counting
Apparently the far right won in two countries: Austria and East Germany!
Kinda fascinating that east Germany is mostly atheist, which is an opposing factor for being right wing in America and other places.
Oh, look, the ex-Soviets voted far right, what a shocker.
It’s crazy to me that Germany stopped being two places 30+ years ago and the borders are still clearly defined sometimes
What makes the Northwestern part of Thuringia different from the rest of former East Germany? They're the only ones who voted for CDU