Germany’s ultra right-wing NPD is the party that never fails to amaze. After leader Holger Apfel was forced to resign over the (alleged) harassment of ‘young comrades’ just before Christmas, his predecessor Udo Voigt made it clear that he wanted his old job back. But Udo Pastörs (what is it about this name?), who helped…
The new CDU-Green coalition in Hesse opens up a whole host possibilities beyond the entrenched pattern of party competition in Germany. Volker Bouffier emerged as an unexpectedly shrewd political operator who presented his party – in Hesse, the other Länder and perhaps even in Berlin – with new options beyond the unloved Great Coalition and the outdated CDU/FDP formats. Plus lots of interesting stuff about names in German Politics
The NPD ended 2013 with a veritable Christmas Panto. On December 19, Holger Apfel, who had become party leader in 2011, stepped down from this and other party offices citing his ill health. On December 22, the party’s highest decision making body published a communique that urged Apfel to ‘disprove allegations directed against him’. Within hours, the nature of these allegations emerged, first in the blogosphere, then in the mainstream media: One ‘young comrade’ (male) claimed that the (drunken) leader had sexually harassed him during the electoral campaign. Shortly afterwards, Apfel left the party for good.
Holger Apfel, the leader of Germany’s right-wing extremist National Democratic Party (NPD), resigns. Apfel’s move adds to the NPD’s many woes: The NPD is very nearly bankrupt as a result of financial irregularities. Moreover, the party’s constitutionality is currently being investigated by the Federal Constitutional Court. These proceedings could result in a ban of the NPD.
SPD votes on the coalition agreement It’ another slow week for German politics, what with the Mandela Memorial, near-civil war in Thailand, the standoff in Ukraine and the South Korean/Japanese Chinese skirmishes. BUT: a small-scale CDU party conference of some 180 delegates has approved unanimously of the CDU/CSU/SPD agreement (a ‘Coalition Treaty’ in German parlance,…
Federal investigators in Germany have launched a probe into 3300 unsolved cases of (attempted) murder. 746 crimes could have been committed by right-wingers for political reasons.
The CDU/CSU/SPD coalition talks are set to come to a conclusion tonight. The more interesting question however is if and how the September election will affect the party system in the medium term. My reading is that the high levels of segmentation that we have seen in the past are becoming unsustainable.
The new version of our Stata module surveybias has now appeared on SSC. From within Stata, simply run ssc install surveybias, all to install it (no surprise here). For the time being, the article on which the module is based has been ungated. Get it while it is free.
The very useful OUP blog has a Q&A session on polling accuracy with Jocelyn Evans and me: Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Joceyln Evans. Moreover, Oxford University Press has kindly ungated the Political Analysis paper on our New Multinomial Accuracy Measure (TM), so grab the PDF while it is free.
We have updated our Stata package surveybias, which estimates bias in pre-election polls and other surveys where the true distribution is known. A new feature facilitates the en masse comparison of surveys collected before an election. Also in this release: somewhat better documentation and toy data to get you started.