I was stunned to read that the Greens had won a quarter of the seats in the Baden-Wuerttemberg state elections in Germany. Then I remembered the recent Japanese atomic worries. I guess that explains it. Everyone knows the Greens are anti-nuclear-power.
Election Results, Baden-Wuerttemberg
| Party | 2011 | 2006 | +/- |
| CDU (center-right) | 39.0% | 44.2% | -5.2% |
| Greens | 24.2% | 11.7% | +12.5% |
| SPD (center-left) | 23.1% | 25.2% | -2.1% |
| FDP (free-marketeer) | 5.3% | 10.7% | -5.4% |
| Voelkisch parties | 2.5% | 3.9% | -1.4% |
| Linke (NeoCommunist) | 2.8% | 3.1% | -0.3% |
| Other | 3.0% | 1.2% | +1.8% |
Everyone lost votes, except Greens, who “cleaned up” (i.e., did well).
— The free-marketeer FDP party — seen as a respectable middle-class party, principally Protestant — lost half its voters to the Greens! [Update: See exit-poll info on party-shifts.]
— The parties that claim the centrist label (SPD and CDU) lost ~1-in-10 of their voters to the Greens. It is interesting that 1-in-10 CDU voters would vote for the far-left Greens on any circumstances.
— “Voelkisch” parties: A catch-all term I use here for right-wing dissident parties with some degree of implied racialist sympathies, the “far-right”, including fundamentalist-Christian parties. Collectively, these lost 1-in-3 of their voters to the Greens. (Note: The stridently-racialist NPD represented represented 17% of this paragrouping in 2006, but 40% in 2011.)
— A note on “Other“, one of the parties here is another “Green” party, more radical, known by the acronym “oedp”. It saw its vote double to nearly 1% of votes cast, but it will receive 0 seats, because:
Only parties getting over 5% of votes get seats, so the Greens actually have 26.1% of seats. SPD took 25.4% of seats. As they are a new slim majority of the Landtag, Greens+SPD will now form a state government. But with Greens as the senior partner! Unprecedented. I believe this will be the first time the Greens will lead a government in Germany. All because of a natural disaster thousands of miles away.
Another western German state — what we in English like to call Rhineland-Palatinate — also held elections, and the Greens entered the state assembly, taking 18% of seats. FDP lost half its voters here, too, knocking it out of the state assembly.
[Sources: BW results; and Spiegel’s results analysis]
Hail To You 
The public is afraid of nuclear radiation far out of proportion to the number of people it’s killed.
Probably the invisible nature of it creeps people out on an instinctual level.
Personally I’m not upset about the thing that happened to the Nuclear Plant in Japan, and the media’s hype about it, giving Nuclear Power a blackeye.
I think that the world-wide economic contraction that began in late 2008 is what led to the resurgence of Voelkisch Parties in many European countries that we’ve seen lately.
The less nuclear power the better, as it increases the chances that the price of oil will reach a point where we see similar financial events to what happened in 2008, perhaps provoking a major crises of public confidence in Europe’s (mis)leaders.
While many rightists have good arguments against the leftist establishment, the problem is that non-co-opted right is usually too marginalized to on its own do the grunt work of discrediting the leftist establishment.
It’s going to take macro-events to hammer down Europe’s current establishment to a point where they become truly vulnerable.
The Greens should be happy too, as a bad economy is good for the environment.
Great points all around.
Price of Oil March ’08 to Present.
From exit polls:
— 47% of B.W.’s voters said Environmental/Nuclear-Power concerns are their top issue in this election, up from 7% in 2006.
— 36% of voters in 2011 who did not vote in 2006, voted for the Greens.
Shifts from all parties to Greens:
— Center-left SPD lost net 143,000 voters from 2006. 140,000 [97.9%] of them voted Green in 2011.
— The neoCommunist Linke party lost net 40,000 voters from 2006. 33,000 [82.5%] of them voted Green in 2011.
— Cente-right CDU lost net 137,000 voters from 2006. 87,000 [63.5%] of them voted Green in 2011.
— The freemarketeer FDP lost net 164,000 voters from 2006. 61,000 [37.2%] of them voted Green in 2011. [Tagesschau.de].
Summary-Graphic of source of Greens’ new voters
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A triumph for Diversity in Stuttgart:
More exit poll stuff:
There seems to be a bloc of 16% who want airstrikes but don’t want Germany involved!
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