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German election diary: Posters everywhere but no attacks

45 points by guruz 13y ago

strongvigilance 13y ago
Perhaps this is partly due to the multitude of parties, which in turn is due to the nature of the electoral system? In a two party system, a lot of people feel like they are voting for the lesser of two evils, so negative campaigning is presumably far more helpful to your cause. If you have to compete with multiple parties for votes, you need to offer more than simply criticism of the opposition.
- brazzy 13y ago
  But what Germany's parties are offering instead of criticism is generic, meaningless feel-good slogans. Better than smear campaigns, to be sure, but still rather disappointing.
  - sentenza 13y ago
    The true problem is that most parties flat-out refuse to state a vision for the future of the country. This election season it has become so bad that "having a plan for the future" and "fringe party" have become synonymous. All parties that have a chance of being in a government coalition only talk about the past, the now, or nothing at all. It's a declaration of intellectual and ideological bankrupcy.
- JonSkeptic 13y ago
  Agreed. I think having more than two parties to choose from would resonate with many Americans. Currently we have only to choose between a douche and a turd. It would be nice to at least get different shades of douche and turd to pick, and who knows, we may get to pick something that isn't horrible.
  - kghose 13y ago
    Unfortunately there is no good solution. I followed Indian politics for a while, and the danger of multi-party elections is the dreaded 'coalition' where a bigger, more mainstream party, in an effort to come into power, will align with a smaller, more extreme/fringe party. In this manner extremist views start to gain ground, and gain influence beyond what the simple vote gave them.
    - kfk 13y ago
      If we stay in Europe, you can see what you just described in the last 70ish year of Italian history.
    - devx 13y ago
      That seems to happen anyway in US. A lot of extremists, especially in the Republican party.
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      Indian politics - at least the Lok Sabha - follows a FPTP system which largely forces politicians to coalesce into a two-party system (in this case, a two-coalition system). In most of Europe, PR systems tend to avoid permanent coalition.
      - Svip 13y ago
        That being said; most European governments are formed by coalitions. But they are seldom the same. And of course, PR is not perfect, there will be some coalitions where small fringe parties do get a larger say than they should. But is not very common. In Denmark, often we form minority governments (that is a government formed from fewer mandates than half the parliament), but usually with a 'support party'. This support party is sometimes ignored, because they are likely too fringe to have the actual government, and thus reaching across the aisle is necessary.
        jbooth 13y ago
        Doesn't the game theory for this sort of always point to the last, smallest member to join the coalition gets to make the most demands relative to it's size? If it's get my party with it's 4 seats on board or fail and hold new elections, I can make demands way in excess of what those 4 seats should get me, right? And then once the government's installed, why not just hold them hostage again? I mean, assuming your parliamentarians have no sense of shame. Maybe that's my bias from watching American legislators.
- dimitar 13y ago
  There are a lot of people protesting the current multiparty proportional system in Bulgaria. They don't like the coalitions, the lists of candidates as opposed to individuals, the indirect election of prime minister (biggest coalition appoints one). However I am very skeptical that changing the political party structure changes much. Aren't in the end the Republicans and Democrats just two big coalitions of movements that tolerate their coalition partners? If you had a multiparty system you'll get a liberal party, a conservative party, a far-right party and maybe a libertarian party. And they'll form long-run coalitions just like they do in multiparty countries. In a multi-party system you are still probably voting for the lesser of two or more evils. In Bulgaria between 4 and 7 factions in parliament so its definitely a multi-party systems, although parties like to place themselves on a left-right spectrum and ally accordingly. Did it have attack ads in all the elections? Absolutely! Ads target everyone, including smaller parties, to get votes from them and create guilt-by-association to their actual or potential coalition partners. You obviously don't target you partners, so thats why a right-left divide seems to appear... so you can claim you get a two-party system, you just have the primaries during the actual election.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    Hey, Bulgaria, want to trade? Here in Canada, the government goes to the party with the most seats, and each seat is handed out in a small regional FPTP election. What this means is that our elections go through two first-past-the-post filters instead of one. In 2008, the Conservatives faced all the other parties aligning against them to throw them out and, through a trick of procedure, they managed to keep control of the government. They were elected with only 38% percent of the vote - the minority ruled as a majority.
    - alanctgardner2 13y ago
      Lots of people unhappy with the Conservatives seem to have this idea that a minority government means they have no mandate to rule, etc. Personally, doesn't it represent the country better to have multiple parties with non-majority representation? If you keep winnowing down until you give most of the power to one group which the majority of people don't mind, they can push through whatever legislation they want with impunity. I would rather have the population represented proportionally by MPs who share their views, so that legislation lives or dies by what proportion of the general populace supports it. As an (extreme) example, you could have parties with different opinions on disjoint issues, like abortion (A) and legalizing marijuana (B). You could then have four parties, AB, A'B, AB', A'B', and some of the populace would vote for each of them based on their support of those issues. If you require that some party 'wins' and gets a majority, people have to work to rank the parties by least distate, by preferring some issues over others. With a whole bunch of minority parties (ideally 2^n, with n binary issues), every voter could actually encode their whole stance on a set of issues, and bills on that issue would pass or fail proportional to the support of the populace. My point being, FPTP might not be the best at the riding level, but there's no reason to mess with which party becomes 'the government'. The country is well served by the existing Parliamentary system. The Senate, on the other hand...
darxius 13y ago
I'm from Canada, and there are attack ads everywhere. I can't stand them. Instead of using your money, your time and your effort trying to destroy another candidate, tell me why you're better. I think it's by and large one of the major reasons I have little faith or interest in the politics of my country.
marijn 13y ago
Actually, some of the posters from Die Grünen (Green Party) have a rather personal taste to them. See [1], which shows Merkel and Röstler (figureheads of the current ruling parties) with the caption "It's always someone else's fault". And then of course, there's the fringe parties, like [2], saying "Which ass will you choose this September?". [1]: http://www.gruene.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Bilder/Webbanner/plakat6_540x382.jpg http://www.gruene.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Bilder/Webbanner/... [2]: http://img01.lachschon.de/images/153979_WelcherArschdarfsdennsein_1.jpg http://img01.lachschon.de/images/153979_WelcherArschdarfsden... Of course, that's still kittens and rainbows compared to the rabid, poisonous insanity that is considered normal in the US.
mhaymo 13y ago
> attack ads, like Super PACs, are unimaginable here, legally and culturally. Legally? There are laws preventing certain kinds of criticism of political parties, and we're celebrating this? Perhaps it's because I haven't seen many attack ads (as a UK citizen who doesn't watch adverts), but I don't get the hatred for them. Is informing the populace of the downsides of your opponents' positions not better than putting contentless posters all over the city?
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  The problem comes when some of the advertised downsides are fictitious and/or designed to appeal to people's irrationality. Personally I think it would be great if there was some enforceable way of making it illegal for politicians to lie about each other. But then you have the problem of who judges that . . . which may end up being an easier problem to solve than the problem of electing good leaders in an American political climate. Not sure.
  - Svip 13y ago
    Well, Germany doesn't have really have activist judges, because they don't have Common Law. Because of this, it is rather hard (and especially hard to justify) to be political in one's judgement in Civil Law systems, so most judges (I obviously cannot say with absolute certainty all) in Civil Law countries tend not to be political motivated.[0] [0] That is not ruling out them being corrupt, of course.
- skrause 13y ago
  Even though the article make this impression it's not illegal in Germany to criticize your political opponent as long as you're not telling straight lies.
- AlecSchueler 13y ago
  While I don't agree with silencing laws, I just wanted to point out that attack ads have been a real problem in the UK recently. In November last year the DUP party in Northern Ireland came under criticism for distributing thousands of leaflets attacking a council decision to normalise the regularity with which the Union flag was flown at the Belfast City Hall [0]. This raised tensions which eventually led to a series of attacks in December on the offices and homes of members of rival parties[1], and sustained rioting in January[2]. [0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20317461 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20317461 [1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20619259 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20619259 [2]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21020296 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21020296
hyperventilator 13y ago
Does any candidate support closing US military bases in Germany?
- rb2k_ 13y ago
  Maybe the far, far right or far, far left. But I think they're universally liked because of the economic upswings they bring to the regions (often rural).
- hnha 13y ago
  not sure that would be possible. their right is based in ancient legal agreements after losing ww2.
  - netrus 13y ago
    It's as easy as just asking them to leave. While the bases re strategically useful for the US, they'd have a hard time labelling them necessary, given the current US-German relationship. But Germany won't ask, because they do some good and little harm.
    - lostlogin 13y ago
      A relevant point I think is that the bases survived the Iraq fiasco which Europe was broadly against. If the bases survived that, they will be there for a while yet.
- lispm 13y ago
  Sure, but there are not many left anyway. There has been some anger because of US spying and the US ignoring German law (flying people to torture centers via Germany).
- arrrg 13y ago
  They are irrelevant and a non-issue on the federal level (I cannot remember when they were last publicly discussed there, much less controversially discussed). They are about equally irrelevant on the state level and certainly also not controversially discussed there. On the very local level (city, county, region) they can be an important issue – but the perspective is nearly always an economic one: The base as a large employer in a region that might grow or shrink or close down. Best city marketing approaches for getting Americans from a nearby base to come visit and buy stuff. It’s always stuff like that. Ok, I guess I can think of one current somewhat heated issue that was recently discussed and that I noticed, living somewhat close to a base and all – but, again, only on a very local level: the US Army being allowed to fly drones for testing purposes (also outside of and between two of their bases). But even there the discussion is not exactly a shouting match and never even connected with any kind of argument to close bases. I think the general consensus in Germany is that having the US as a tight ally is a good thing. And you don’t throw a tight ally out of your country, especially if what they are doing there is (at least perceived as) completely harmless. Sure, there might be widespread general disagreements with the US military strategy as a whole, but that does not, in general, lead people to want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to say. I think you might be able to rally quite a few people around a hot button issue like the stationing of nuclear weapons in Germany (but I’m not even sure whether the US still does that), but throwing out the US? Not really. If you are an American who wants to close all US bases in Germany quite a few German politicians would be indifferent or worried about the US-German relationship and many local politicians with a nearby base would be furious about you taking away all those jobs (not that the bases matter for the German economy in general in any significant way).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
igl 13y ago
What is there to attack, when they are all exactly the same? Germany will hop between SPD and CDU forever. With 0 change. The greens and FDP are merely helpers to fake some noise in our mindless american-style media apparatus. I don't even bother with voting. Politics only distracting you from what is real.

45 points by guruz 13y ago

Perhaps this is partly due to the multitude of parties, which in turn is due to the nature of the electoral system? In a two party system, a lot of people feel like they are voting for the lesser of two evils, so negative campaigning is presumably far more helpful to your cause. If you have to compete with multiple parties for votes, you need to offer more than simply criticism of the opposition.

brazzy 13y ago
But what Germany's parties are offering instead of criticism is generic, meaningless feel-good slogans. Better than smear campaigns, to be sure, but still rather disappointing.
- sentenza 13y ago
  The true problem is that most parties flat-out refuse to state a vision for the future of the country. This election season it has become so bad that "having a plan for the future" and "fringe party" have become synonymous. All parties that have a chance of being in a government coalition only talk about the past, the now, or nothing at all. It's a declaration of intellectual and ideological bankrupcy.
JonSkeptic 13y ago
Agreed. I think having more than two parties to choose from would resonate with many Americans. Currently we have only to choose between a douche and a turd. It would be nice to at least get different shades of douche and turd to pick, and who knows, we may get to pick something that isn't horrible.
- kghose 13y ago
  Unfortunately there is no good solution. I followed Indian politics for a while, and the danger of multi-party elections is the dreaded 'coalition' where a bigger, more mainstream party, in an effort to come into power, will align with a smaller, more extreme/fringe party. In this manner extremist views start to gain ground, and gain influence beyond what the simple vote gave them.
  - kfk 13y ago
    If we stay in Europe, you can see what you just described in the last 70ish year of Italian history.
  - devx 13y ago
    That seems to happen anyway in US. A lot of extremists, especially in the Republican party.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    Indian politics - at least the Lok Sabha - follows a FPTP system which largely forces politicians to coalesce into a two-party system (in this case, a two-coalition system). In most of Europe, PR systems tend to avoid permanent coalition.
    - Svip 13y ago
      That being said; most European governments are formed by coalitions. But they are seldom the same. And of course, PR is not perfect, there will be some coalitions where small fringe parties do get a larger say than they should. But is not very common. In Denmark, often we form minority governments (that is a government formed from fewer mandates than half the parliament), but usually with a 'support party'. This support party is sometimes ignored, because they are likely too fringe to have the actual government, and thus reaching across the aisle is necessary.
      - jbooth 13y ago
        Doesn't the game theory for this sort of always point to the last, smallest member to join the coalition gets to make the most demands relative to it's size? If it's get my party with it's 4 seats on board or fail and hold new elections, I can make demands way in excess of what those 4 seats should get me, right? And then once the government's installed, why not just hold them hostage again? I mean, assuming your parliamentarians have no sense of shame. Maybe that's my bias from watching American legislators.
dimitar 13y ago
There are a lot of people protesting the current multiparty proportional system in Bulgaria. They don't like the coalitions, the lists of candidates as opposed to individuals, the indirect election of prime minister (biggest coalition appoints one). However I am very skeptical that changing the political party structure changes much. Aren't in the end the Republicans and Democrats just two big coalitions of movements that tolerate their coalition partners? If you had a multiparty system you'll get a liberal party, a conservative party, a far-right party and maybe a libertarian party. And they'll form long-run coalitions just like they do in multiparty countries. In a multi-party system you are still probably voting for the lesser of two or more evils. In Bulgaria between 4 and 7 factions in parliament so its definitely a multi-party systems, although parties like to place themselves on a left-right spectrum and ally accordingly. Did it have attack ads in all the elections? Absolutely! Ads target everyone, including smaller parties, to get votes from them and create guilt-by-association to their actual or potential coalition partners. You obviously don't target you partners, so thats why a right-left divide seems to appear... so you can claim you get a two-party system, you just have the primaries during the actual election.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  Hey, Bulgaria, want to trade? Here in Canada, the government goes to the party with the most seats, and each seat is handed out in a small regional FPTP election. What this means is that our elections go through two first-past-the-post filters instead of one. In 2008, the Conservatives faced all the other parties aligning against them to throw them out and, through a trick of procedure, they managed to keep control of the government. They were elected with only 38% percent of the vote - the minority ruled as a majority.
  - alanctgardner2 13y ago
    Lots of people unhappy with the Conservatives seem to have this idea that a minority government means they have no mandate to rule, etc. Personally, doesn't it represent the country better to have multiple parties with non-majority representation? If you keep winnowing down until you give most of the power to one group which the majority of people don't mind, they can push through whatever legislation they want with impunity. I would rather have the population represented proportionally by MPs who share their views, so that legislation lives or dies by what proportion of the general populace supports it. As an (extreme) example, you could have parties with different opinions on disjoint issues, like abortion (A) and legalizing marijuana (B). You could then have four parties, AB, A'B, AB', A'B', and some of the populace would vote for each of them based on their support of those issues. If you require that some party 'wins' and gets a majority, people have to work to rank the parties by least distate, by preferring some issues over others. With a whole bunch of minority parties (ideally 2^n, with n binary issues), every voter could actually encode their whole stance on a set of issues, and bills on that issue would pass or fail proportional to the support of the populace. My point being, FPTP might not be the best at the riding level, but there's no reason to mess with which party becomes 'the government'. The country is well served by the existing Parliamentary system. The Senate, on the other hand...

darxius 13y ago

I'm from Canada, and there are attack ads everywhere. I can't stand them. Instead of using your money, your time and your effort trying to destroy another candidate, tell me why you're better. I think it's by and large one of the major reasons I have little faith or interest in the politics of my country.

marijn 13y ago

Actually, some of the posters from Die Grünen (Green Party) have a rather personal taste to them. See [1], which shows Merkel and Röstler (figureheads of the current ruling parties) with the caption "It's always someone else's fault". And then of course, there's the fringe parties, like [2], saying "Which ass will you choose this September?". [1]: http://www.gruene.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Bilder/Webbanner/plakat6_540x382.jpg http://www.gruene.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Bilder/Webbanner/... [2]: http://img01.lachschon.de/images/153979_WelcherArschdarfsdennsein_1.jpg http://img01.lachschon.de/images/153979_WelcherArschdarfsden... Of course, that's still kittens and rainbows compared to the rabid, poisonous insanity that is considered normal in the US.

mhaymo 13y ago

> attack ads, like Super PACs, are unimaginable here, legally and culturally. Legally? There are laws preventing certain kinds of criticism of political parties, and we're celebrating this? Perhaps it's because I haven't seen many attack ads (as a UK citizen who doesn't watch adverts), but I don't get the hatred for them. Is informing the populace of the downsides of your opponents' positions not better than putting contentless posters all over the city?

jamesaguilar 13y ago
The problem comes when some of the advertised downsides are fictitious and/or designed to appeal to people's irrationality. Personally I think it would be great if there was some enforceable way of making it illegal for politicians to lie about each other. But then you have the problem of who judges that . . . which may end up being an easier problem to solve than the problem of electing good leaders in an American political climate. Not sure.
- Svip 13y ago
  Well, Germany doesn't have really have activist judges, because they don't have Common Law. Because of this, it is rather hard (and especially hard to justify) to be political in one's judgement in Civil Law systems, so most judges (I obviously cannot say with absolute certainty all) in Civil Law countries tend not to be political motivated.[0] [0] That is not ruling out them being corrupt, of course.
skrause 13y ago
Even though the article make this impression it's not illegal in Germany to criticize your political opponent as long as you're not telling straight lies.
AlecSchueler 13y ago
While I don't agree with silencing laws, I just wanted to point out that attack ads have been a real problem in the UK recently. In November last year the DUP party in Northern Ireland came under criticism for distributing thousands of leaflets attacking a council decision to normalise the regularity with which the Union flag was flown at the Belfast City Hall [0]. This raised tensions which eventually led to a series of attacks in December on the offices and homes of members of rival parties[1], and sustained rioting in January[2]. [0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20317461 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20317461 [1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20619259 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20619259 [2]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21020296 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-21020296

hyperventilator 13y ago

Does any candidate support closing US military bases in Germany?

rb2k_ 13y ago
Maybe the far, far right or far, far left. But I think they're universally liked because of the economic upswings they bring to the regions (often rural).
hnha 13y ago
not sure that would be possible. their right is based in ancient legal agreements after losing ww2.
- netrus 13y ago
  It's as easy as just asking them to leave. While the bases re strategically useful for the US, they'd have a hard time labelling them necessary, given the current US-German relationship. But Germany won't ask, because they do some good and little harm.
  - lostlogin 13y ago
    A relevant point I think is that the bases survived the Iraq fiasco which Europe was broadly against. If the bases survived that, they will be there for a while yet.
lispm 13y ago
Sure, but there are not many left anyway. There has been some anger because of US spying and the US ignoring German law (flying people to torture centers via Germany).
arrrg 13y ago
They are irrelevant and a non-issue on the federal level (I cannot remember when they were last publicly discussed there, much less controversially discussed). They are about equally irrelevant on the state level and certainly also not controversially discussed there. On the very local level (city, county, region) they can be an important issue – but the perspective is nearly always an economic one: The base as a large employer in a region that might grow or shrink or close down. Best city marketing approaches for getting Americans from a nearby base to come visit and buy stuff. It’s always stuff like that. Ok, I guess I can think of one current somewhat heated issue that was recently discussed and that I noticed, living somewhat close to a base and all – but, again, only on a very local level: the US Army being allowed to fly drones for testing purposes (also outside of and between two of their bases). But even there the discussion is not exactly a shouting match and never even connected with any kind of argument to close bases. I think the general consensus in Germany is that having the US as a tight ally is a good thing. And you don’t throw a tight ally out of your country, especially if what they are doing there is (at least perceived as) completely harmless. Sure, there might be widespread general disagreements with the US military strategy as a whole, but that does not, in general, lead people to want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to say. I think you might be able to rally quite a few people around a hot button issue like the stationing of nuclear weapons in Germany (but I’m not even sure whether the US still does that), but throwing out the US? Not really. If you are an American who wants to close all US bases in Germany quite a few German politicians would be indifferent or worried about the US-German relationship and many local politicians with a nearby base would be furious about you taking away all those jobs (not that the bases matter for the German economy in general in any significant way).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

igl 13y ago

What is there to attack, when they are all exactly the same? Germany will hop between SPD and CDU forever. With 0 change. The greens and FDP are merely helpers to fake some noise in our mindless american-style media apparatus. I don't even bother with voting. Politics only distracting you from what is real.