At today’s AfD conference, Jörg Meuthen has been reelected as one of the the two co-chairs of the party. Although there was no other candidate, he garnered only 72% “yes” votes. Meuthen was once promoted by Petry because of his convenient market liberal profile, but quickly became friendly with the more radical elements. The election…
After Frauke Petry, herself not exactly a centrist by conventional standards, has left the party, the rightmost factions in the AfD are becoming even more influential (or perhaps just more visible). The party will elect a new leadership this coming weekend, and Andre Poggenburg will stand as a candidate for deputy party leader. Poggenburg, who…
The AfD’s short history is once more repeating itself, never exactly a tragedy, but ever more farcical. Back in 2015, Bernd Lucke,the then prominent face of the party, became increasingly worried about its radicalisation. He tried to strengthen his position as leader, set up a network of like-minded individuals within the party, was accused of…
The CDU/CSU’s result is bad, but mostly so in comparison to 2013. The Christian Democrats are the biggest party, but they have scored their second-worst result since forever. But they had similar results in 2005 and 2009. By her ratings, Merkel has not been terribly popular for most of her tenure. 2013 was lucky timing…
So: three more surveys. No kidding Finality finally got a bit more final: just to annoy me (now here is a narcissist), three further surveys were published today (already yesterday in Germany). One of them is only new-ish: Emnid was in the field from September 14-21, so I take their data as a snapshot of…
I just suppressed the urge to insert the word ’countdown’ into the headline. See what I’m doing here? We have four more polls by Allensbach and Forsa (published on Tuesday), and by FGW and GMS (published on Thursday), and presumably, these are the last that we are going to see before election day. Do they…
German Elections: Three more polls We Anoraks are all getting a little jittery here. It’s 134 hours until closing time and there will be only a small handful of polls coming in in the next couple of days, so is there anything new that may be divined from the latest crop, published today (Insa), on…
It’s just a single poll Once more, repeat after me: It’s just a single poll. It’s also the time for horse-race journalism (and for horse-race blogging). In this specific case, the single poll is the most recent instalment of the “Deutschlandtrend”, a survey-series that Infratest-dimap runs for public broadcasting giant ARD. From the results (SPD:…
What’s the matter with the AfD? Over the last couple of weeks, the mainstream media (or as the AfD would have it, the “lying press”) have begun to write off the AfD as past its sell-by day (btw, did you realise that we won the battle against populism when Wilders performed slightly less well than…
The other day, someone on twitter suggested that the polls on the upper margins of my latest model-based estimates of AfD support were conducted by the “notoriously AfD-friendly INSA company”. https://twitter.com/freifrauvonitze/status/845565084290158593 This view is not uncommon in Germany. INSA, who do polling for Germany’s premier tabloid Bild, want to prop up support for the AfD…