So. Election day is in two weeks, we just had another TV debate with all three candidates for being chancellor.... which I didn't watch. Because me having to listen to this CDU clown who I fear will be our next chancellor would seriously put my TV in danger of being killed by a flying remote. Also, I have already voted - today, via mail-in voting.
So, it's unclear how tonight's debate shifted the polls, but before that, it looked lioke the SPD may actually win this election. See
this handy summary of the latest polls by different pollsters. For the too linky, didn't click folks:
SPD at 25-26%, CDU/CSU at about 21%, Greens at 15-17%, FDP a bit below that, Linke at 6%. I'll ignore the AfD because no one else will work with them anyway.
These current polls make me fear that the CDU/CSU might turn this around and win, again. If not, the SPD will. In any case, the Greens have totally lost their momentum and are in serious danger to end up in the opposition again.
I see the following possibly coalitions:
- CDU/CSU and SPD: The continuation of the current government, only with Laschet replacing Merkel. The worst possible outcome, damning the country to another four years of standstill.
- SPD and CDU/CSU: Same parties, but with Scholz as chancellor. Not that much better.
- SPD, CDU/CSU and FDP: If the first two don't get enough votes and need a third party, I think the FDP is the easier partner to work with compared to the Greens.
- SPD, Greens and Linke: It's a really close call if this is even possible. In any case, this would be a very hard thing to keep up, because the Linke have some wackos in their ranks who are prone to be trouble, and with only a paper-thin majority that's hard to deal with. But this is also the best chance of keeping the CDU/CSU out of the governing coalition.
You'll notice that there are some options missing. SPD and Greens won't get enough votes to form a two-party coalition and will need a third party to form a government. If that's not the Linke, CDU/CSU and FDP are the leftover options. Both of them have no reason to go into a SPD/Green coalition as the third wheel when they can have a CDU/CSU/FDP/SPD coalition in which the SPD will bend over to their will anyway. Which the SPD will do, as they have proven time and again. And even for the SPD it's much more comfortable to form a government with CDU/CSU and FDP than with those pesky Greens.
I really hope I'm wrong, but the outlook is very bleak. I basically just hope the SPD can maintain their lead over the CDU/CSU, so Laschet won't become our next chancellor. He is just unfit to be a political leader: A few years ago, when working as a university lecturer, he lost some exams, so with nothing to base the grades on, he just made them up. Which of course got noticed (he gave grades to students who didn't even take the exam). This summer during the floods, he laughed his ass off at a joke while standing in the background as the President of Germany held a speech in a flooded town, live on national TV.
And just a couple of days ago, there was a court ruling declaring the clearing of a protest camp against surface mining that the state government of Northrhine-Westfalia - of which he is Prime Minister - ordered was against the law. The clearing was justified with the blatantly lame pretext of the tree houses built by the protesters in a forest that was to be destroyed to make way for the mine
were not conforming to fire protection rules for buildings. Laschet was even caught on tape admitting publicly that he needed a pretext to order the clearing. And the kicker is: During that clearing, a protester was killed due to this illegal police action which Laschet has personally ordered, in full knowledge of the illegality of it.
This sorry excuse for a politician must not become chancellor. Not only is he obviously unfit to hold any position of power and responsibility, he is also a total lightweight and can't handle crises at all. I bet foreign governments like the Russians and Chinese would be very glad to negotiate with him.
On the other side of the political battle, this week saw the Berlin police
search the Federal Ministry of Finance, which is lead by the SPD chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz, on the order of the district attourney's office of the small town of Osnabrück in the West German province. The reasoning is suspicion that leading members of the Financial Intelligence Unit, which is tasked with battling large scale money laundering, have allegedly deliberately not passed on information to other authorities, thus letting money launderers get away. This is just grand, and this short before the election it
stinks.
You notice that I didn't talk about Baerbock. That's because the Greens are largely irrelevant right now. The
Zeitgeist is completely on their side, yet they manage to totally tank...
bad laws are bad? anyway: the person guarding the urn should have prevented this ballot from being cast in this case, seems to be the prevailing twitter opinion (yes yes...)
