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Max's election maps and assorted others

Bundestag 1953
    • This was probably one of the more time-consuming ones, because the only point working in my favour was having a base sort-of done from 1949, plus the CSVs from the Bundeswahlleiter that were sort of half-done, only needing me to add percentages to get what I'd need.

    Bundestag 1953
    val-de-1953.png
     
    • Baden-Württemberg 2016
    • The electoral system of Baden-Württemberg looks a bit different from those of most German states, and resembles the system used for the Bundestag in 1949 more than anything. The voter gets a single vote, given to a candidate in their constituency. In each constituency the election works on simple plurality, after which the votes are tallied statewide combining all candidates put up by each party. A proportional calculation is made for 120 seats, and if a party has gotten more constituency seats than they would be entitled to, the size of the Landtag is increased until proportionality is achieved (since 2013, this is how it works for the Bundestag as well).

    The seats given out proportionally, however, are not distributed according to any party list. Instead, they are given out to those constituency candidates who got the best percentage results without winning their seats. These candidates are declared elected for their constituencies as well, obtaining what is called a Zweitmandat, or second mandate, in the constituency. There's no system for distributing these evenly between constituencies, so a given constituency may have one, two or three representatives purely depending on the statewide results - generally, more closely-contested constituencies will more likely get Zweitmandate, but there's no hard and fast rule.

    The 2016 election was somewhat historic - in 2011, the CDU, in power since 1953 with one brief exception, was defeated amidst debate over the hugely-controversial Stuttgart 21 transport project. The Greens reaped most of the benefits, and a coalition was formed between the Greens and SPD under Green leader Winfried Kretschmann. This proved somewhat popular, and Kretschmann in particular established himself as a Prime Minister with strong centrist to centre-left appeal. In 2016, this incumbency paid dividends, and Kretschmann won the Greens their first-ever plurality on the state level. The SPD collapsed utterly, falling behind the AfD (which picked up traditionally-SPD working-class voters in industrial cities like Mannheim and Pforzheim), and Kretschmann reformed his government as a "grand coalition" of sorts with the CDU.

    val-de-bw-2016.png
     
    • Bundestag 1969
    • In 1969, for the first time in West Germany's short history, a Bundestag election led directly to a change in government. The grand coalition between SPD and CDU, which had served since 1966, broke down during the elections as each party ran its own candidate for Chancellor and the traditionally spirited rival campaigns. SPD leader Willy Brandt, who had served as Foreign Minister in the grand coalition, secured their best result ever with 42.7 percent of the vote. This placed them well behind the Union parties, and in fact the SPD's growth was largely at the expense of the declining FDP, but that was precisely why the change of government could happen - a younger generation in the FDP were fed up with the party's lack of direction, and decided it was time to orient themselves toward the new leftward winds and join the SPD in a new governing coalition.

    val-de-1969.png
     
    • Köln 2014
    • And now it's time to return to German municipal elections, today featuring Köln, the fourth-largest city in Germany and the largest city in (though not the capital of) its largest state.

    Köln is one of the oldest cities in Germany, having been founded by the Romans under the name Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium sometime during the reign of Emperor Claudius (after whose wife it was named). As capital of Germania Inferior, it grew to be a substantial city even then, and retained this status under the Franks, who placed an archbishopric in the city. The Prince-Archbishops of Köln would gain one of the seven Electoral seats of the Holy Roman Empire, and their land holdings stretched across much of the lower Rhineland and the Sauerland to the east - but did not include the city itself, which was made a free imperial city in 1475 after having been de facto independent of episcopal rule for about two hundred years. This arrangement carried on until the French Revolution, at which point Köln fell inside the "natural borders" of France and became a sub-prefecture in the department of the Roer. After Napoleon's defeat, the Rhineland was given to Prussia, which was thought better suited to guarding the region against renewed French attacks, but the attacks never came, and the Catholic Rhineland chafed under Protestant Prussian rule. It became a stronghold of the Centre Party, Köln being no exception, with Centre stalwart and future Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ruling the city throughout the Weimar era.

    The city gained essentially its current shape during the interwar period, with the industrial city of Mülheim/Rhein (not to be confused with Mülheim/Ruhr) on the right bank of the Rhine being annexed in 1914 and the Worringen region north of the city coming in in 1922. This tipped the balance of city politics toward the left as the National Socialist dictatorship ended, and the SPD would rule from 1956 until 1999 without exception. In 1975, a further round of incorporations saw (among others) the cities of Porz and Wesseling, south of the city centre, brought into Köln, but Wesseling would secede again after eighteen months. This rendered the city a bit more favourable for the CDU, but happened to coincide with the growth of the Green Party, which would find a particular stronghold in Köln, in a state otherwise infamous for shafting minor parties.

    NRW is one of two states (the other being Schleswig-Holstein) to use a mixed-member system for electing municipal councils, and the only one to do it with a consistent system of single-member wards. As such, out of the 90 seats on Köln's city council, 45 are elected in single-member constituencies, which gives us a nice overview of which parties are strong where - broadly speaking, the right bank and the north of the left bank support the SPD, the south of the left bank supports the CDU, and the Greens are strong in the inner city and the area around the university to the southwest. Unlike in Bundestag elections (and most state elections), the voter only casts a single vote that goes to both his/her local candidate and the connected party list - unlike in B-W, there are party lists to determine who gets elected outside the Direktmandaten.

    There used to be a 5% threshold to go with the mixed-member system - this was highly unusual for a municipal election system in Germany, and as such the rule was struck down after the 1994 elections by a Constitutional Court ruling. Just in time, as it turned out, for some new parties to appear on the scene representing some of the... less mainstream sides of politics. On the one hand, there was the PDS (as it was then called), which won two seats in 1999 and grew to six in 2014. On the other hand, there is the Pro-Bewegung, which is a hard-right Islamophobic grouping, and likely precursor to PEGIDA, which was founded after 9/11 and counts Köln as its particular home. The Bürgerbewegung pro Köln won four seats straight away in 2004, and while hobbled by the rise of the AfD, continued being represented on the council until its dissolution in 2018.

    On the whole, the 2014 elections were somewhat uneventful. The 90s had seen a resurgence for the CDU, same as in a lot of German cities, but this definitively ended in 2009 when the party went below 30% for the first time since its founding. The SPD were able to claw back to a narrow first place, keeping it in 2014, but the Greens are now strong enough to control which of the Volksparteien rules Köln.

    val-de-k-2014.png​

    There are separate mayoral elections in NRW, as in most German states, and these were rather more eventful than the council elections. Incumbent SPD mayor Jürgen Roters, who had won office in 2009 amidst a corruption scandal involving the CDU leadership and a local savings bank, was later revealed to have benefitted from the same corrupt arrangement. The so-called Kölscher Klüngel ("Köln clique", a form of mutual cronyism between politics and business regarded as particular to Köln) came into public discussion yet again, and there was a yearning for someone from outside politics. In 2015, as Roters' term came up, the CDU, FDP and Greens announced their mutual support for lawyer and ex-deputy mayor of Gelsenkirchen Henriette Reker, a political independent, to succeed him. She would win the backing of the Free Voters and the independent electoral association "Deine Freunde" ("Your Friends" - a greenish NIMBY outfit), and romped to victory with 52% of the vote in the first round. Perhaps illustrating the depth of protest sentiment, the candidate of Die PARTEI came in third with 7%.
     
    • Sachsen-Anhalt 1946
    • And on a similar "red map" note, I remembered I made a crude version of this a while ago, so I dusted it off, brought the boundaries into line with what I now know the Kreise to have (roughly) looked like at the time, and added a proper key.

    Sachsen-Anhalt 1946
    val-de-st-1946.png

    Consider it research for Die zweite Chance, if you will.
     
    • Quebec 1989 (Equality Party)
    • Ares96 said:
    Seriously thinking of doing heatmaps for at least the former, and I suppose some federal election maps too.
    Click to expand...
    A promise long forgotten is fulfilled.

    In 1985, Robert Bourassa was elected Premier of Quebec in a landslide victory over the ailing Parti Québecois, which had been defeated in their ambitions for sovereignty and seen the retirement of their leader and founder René Lévesque. Now, Bourassa's Liberal Party could count on near-monolithic support from anglophones and allophones (people whose first language is neither English nor French), who for understandable reasons have tended to be put off by sovereigntism, but the reason they were able to win was that francophone ridings which had supported the PQ under Lévesque turned to the Liberals. Bourassa was highly conscious of this fact, and while it's unclear to what extent Bourassa believed in much of anything, he was probably some kind of soft Quebec nationalist himself. During his first stint as Premier he'd attempted to dilute PQ support by passing laws supporting French language use, and he returned to power determined to defend Bill 101, the PQ's landmark achievement in government which declared French the sole official language of the province and imposed strict limitations on the use of English by government ans business alike.

    This became significant following the Ford v Quebec case in 1988, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that it was unconstitutional to require Montreal shop owners to display signage in French only. The ruling met with outcry from Quebec nationalists of all stripes, and Bourassa's government responded by making minor alterations to Bill 101 and then invoking the "notwithstanding clause", a legal instrument in the Canadian constitution that allows a province to formally disregard judicial review. This is typically only done in extreme cases, and the invocation proved just as controversial as the ruling itself. Montreal anglophones suddenly found themselves unable to trust the Liberal Party, and in the spring of 1989, as Quebec prepared to hold provincial elections, they formed their own political movement to advocate a return to bilingualism on the provincial level.

    The actual party affiliation of these "anglophone" candidates (for lack of a better term) was divided: in Montreal, eighteen candidates stood under the banner of the Equality Party (Parti Égalité), while sixteen candidates stood outside the metropolitan area under the Unity Party (Parti Unité). The former had some success, winning four seats and effectively depriving the Liberals of their stronghold on the West Island for the first time in decades. That being said, Bourassa won a second majority government, and Quebec was hardly moving in a federalist direction - Bourassa carried on Lévesque's attempts at negotiating a new constitutional settlement that would give Quebec expanded rights within Canada, which failed spectacularly by around 1990, and the next few years would see a massive revival for the sovereigntist movement. With the PQ resurgent, Montreal anglophones closed ranks behind the Liberals once again (it helped that Bourassa retired in 1993). The Equality Party died on its arse, never to return, but just as they'd won in spite of Montreal in 1989, they would lose in spite of Montreal in 1994.

    val-ca-qc-1989-equality.png
     
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