Monday, March 5, 2018

The Voting Story

ARD (public TV, Channel One) in Germany wrote up a fine piece on a research project.  The hype?  Two German universities did research and interviewed around 500 German-Turks and German-Russians. 

The chief product of this research?  How the two groups vote.

So here's the shocker....migrant Germans are less likely to vote.   The German-Turks vote only at the rate of 64-percent.....the German-Russians.....58-percent.  In a normal German election, roughly 76-percent will show up and vote.

When they do show up and vote....how does it go?  This gets interesting.  The German-Russians tend to vote right-of-center...the German-Turks?  Left-of-center.

They can even show that since 2013 (the immigrant crisis starting).....German-Russians left the CDU position and identified more with the AfD folks.  It's not overwhelming but enough to show a trend.

On the German-Turk side....around 35-percent are solid votes for the SPD, with the CDU/CSU getting near 20-percent.

So out there for the German-Turks is this new political party.....ADD (Alliance of German Democrats). It's not one that you'd typically see mentioned much.  The odd feature?  They are built mostly for German-Turks and have a relationship to.....AKP (the party of Turkish President Erdogan).  Their power-base? NRW (northwest Germany). 

Why does any of this matter?  The migrant base in Germany has grown, and over the past decade....Germans have sat there wondering how it changes the dynamics of voting in the country.  Now?  The fact that they vote less than plain average Germans generally means they have less interest in the outcome. 

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