Between the Saxony and Brandenburg state elections, I can offer a couple of observations:
1. Is there any affect to national politics? I would suggest it's mostly trends. The SPD did a crappy job yesterday....losing positions from the state elections of five years ago. The AfD did very well....gaining positions from the state elections of five years ago.
2. Were the polls correct. The polls were around 97-percent correct (in my humble opinion). They might not have guessed the loss levels of the Linke Party correctly, but the last poll or two for August in both states....leaned toward being accurate.
3. Do these two affect the Thuringian election (in seven weeks)? Well, yes. Right now, using the polls for July and August, the Linke Party is supposed to do well and win (this is a eastern German state). But yesterday, the Linke Party did lousy and there's evidence in both elections that Linke Party enthusiasts left and voted for the AfD. I suspect that AfD will make a big attempt to swing more voters over. I would suggest that five points of the current Linke trend....will fall over and be split between the SPD and AfD parties. You might see the AfD build just enough of a trend to be the chief-vote-getter.
4. Blame leading back to migration policy and Merkel? Back in 2014/2015, the Chancellor could have done a strategy session and developed a better immigration policy with limits. Instead of reacting then.....the chief plan was to make the growing AfD business into a big negative 'drama', and hype the AfD as bad for the German voter. Well....in the eastern half of Germany....around 20-percent of the public has dumped the CDU and SPD....going to the AfD as a 'message' to the Chancellor.
At this point, none of the regular parties can go back and suggest a mistake, or resolve this public trust business. AfD owns the only anti-migration party in Germany, and the public is stuck with them, if they want to send a message.
5. The behavior last night with journalists? Between Channel One (ARD) and Channel Two (ZDF)....at least six hours of time was devoted to the state elections and the effects. One could laugh over the rolling-of-the-eyes done by one of the ARD journalists when talking to the AfD strategy guy....as childish. But it was simply a demonstration of the type of journalism that you are stuck with in Germany.
6. Did millions of Germans get hyped up over the two state elections? No. Maybe if you lived in Brandenburg or Saxony.....it was a somewhat big deal, but over the rest of Germany....regular people devoted maybe ten minutes of time to see who won, and then flipped the channel over to some travel documentary from Peru, or watched a Krimi-murder movie.
The effort by ZDF and ARD to turn this into a five-star drama? It has serious limits. I would suggest that working-class Germans from beyond these two states just didn't have that much of a thrill over the results or the suggested 'failures'.
7. Essential losers in the two races? It centers around the FDP (they didn't cross the 5-percent point in either race), the SPD (losing lots of voters over five years ago), and the Linke Party (shocker that they did so poorly in an eastern region).
8. Voting flipping? That was readily apparent in the numbers shown last night....that voters crossed the line and voted against what they did five years ago. It's also apparent that some voters came out and voted....when they typically would have stayed home.
9. Leading to the 2020 state election? Well, in the third week of Feb....there's a Hamburg state election. That is the only 2020 election on the calendar at this point. Polling hasn't been done, and I would suggest the AfD situation there will be only in the 8-percent range. The Green Party might be getting upwards to 35-percent locally. Lot of hype there over climate change.
10. Finally, as much as journalists suggest that climate change is the number one topic in politics today....within Germany. I would go out and suggest that other topics exist, and the general public view doesn't agree with journalist's hype.
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