Talking Over the Thuringian October 2019 Election

With all the hype going on....it's one of those occasions to go back and examine how this state election in Germany came to the current crisis.

First, a reminder....Thuringian is a east German state, and there is still (30 years later) some issues left over from the DDR days.

So this election centered on 1,108,388 total voters (roughly 65-percent of the registered voters in the state).  As most state elections go....65-percent is about average.  I know....back in the 1960s and 1970s....in West Germany....the states would have 80 to 90 percent of voters show up.  But things are different today.

Hyped-up election?  Yes.....the last state election....they marginally got around 52-percent of the population to show up and vote.

60,000 of the 1.1-million votes don't count....because they were cast for parties which didn't meet the 5-percent threshold.  It's a national rule, and a state rule.....as a party, you need five-percent or more....to be getting seats.

So there are 90 seats in the state assembly.  They would be split among the six parties who got 5-percent or more.

What hurt in this election is that both the CDU (right-of-center) and SPD (left-of-center) lost support over the last election (18 seats total lost between the two).  This opens the door for problems....to form a coalition.

The three parties who got 'gains' out of the voting?  The Linke Party, the AfD Party, and the FDP Party.

So if you were going to arrange a March 2020 new election in Thuringian to resolve the current crisis?

You might get enough people aggravated for one extreme or the other....to motivate more people to show up (maybe hitting 70-percent of voters), but I'd go and suggest both the Greens and FDP would suffer, and maybe falter below the 5-percent point (meaning they get zero seats).

Here's the other thing....no one in Germany really expected another state election in 2020 (other than Hamburg's race shortly), so if this did become a reality with another election....it would create 'ripples' to affect the spring 2021 state elections (3 of them).

To close out on this essay, I'll quote off H. L. Mencken (Baltimore journalist from 100 years ago)....who said "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."  One should note, he meant this in the harsh and critical way.