The only certainty coming out of last night’s election results here in Hesse, Germany, are that the ruling conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) are losers in all but name. They have lost their massive overall majority in the Hessian state parliament and, for a while, looked even to have lost their status as the region’s biggest party.
They won by 0.1% in the end from the opposition social democrats (SPD), who were a good 1.5% ahead in most exit polls. (The notorious Bradley Effect in play there, for sure.) The overall swing to the SPD was a huge 10%.
The trouble is, with the CDU and the SPD on the same number of seats after the proportional representation calculation, no one has a majority and no one seems to be able to find one.
Pundits suggest the SPD could form a coalition with the Greens and the far-left Die Linke, which would push them just over the 50% mark, but the social democrats don’t want to work with neo-communists. An SPD campaigner I happened to speak to on Friday night told me they'd rather be out of power than in with the far left.
CDU and the centre-right liberal Free Democrats don’t themselves form 50%, and they’re hardly going to form with a leftie Green/Linke pairing.
And the CDU and SPD hate each other too much to form a coalition together, having fought one of the fieriest campaigns the state has seen.
So the age-old problem of the German electoral system arises. No one can say “Ja”.
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