Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Mac Tan edited this page May 2, 2021 · 10 revisions

Welcome to the Germany-2021 wiki! This home page contains the forecast as it stands as of the simulator's most recent run.

Polls

Here's where the parties stand in the current polling average as used by the forecast:

Relative to their 2017 performances,

  • the CDU/CSU are polling much worse (32.9% of the vote in 2017);
  • the SPD is polling much worse (down from 20.5%);
  • AfD is polling slightly worse (down from 12.6%);
  • the FDP is polling roughly the same (10.9% in 2017);
  • Die Linke is polling slightly worse (down from 9.2%);
  • the Greens are polling much better (up from 8.9%).

Here's how polls have changed since the beginning of the year (note that because the trend is smoothed over the previous five days of polling, the most recent value in the trend line will not necessarily match the current polling average above):

The forecast

The forecast uses simulation to produce estimates and ranges of plausible values for the share of the vote and number of seats each party would win if the election were held today. This produces a number of outputs that we can look at, some of which may be more interesting than others.

Bundestag size

Because of how seat allocation works, the total size of the Bundestag is not fixed from election to election. Currently, the forecast expects the Bundestag to increase in size from its current 709 seats:

Seats by party

The main output of the forecast is the projected number of seats for each party. Currently the forecast thinks it's a toss-up as to whether the CDU/CSU or the Greens will be the largest party in the Bundestag, although it does not expect any one party to win a majority.

No parties appear to be at serious risk of losing parliamentary status, with all six polling well above the 5% needed to qualify for seats.

Coalition probabilities

No one party is ever expected to win an outright majority of seats in the Bundestag: the last and to date only time this has ever happened was in 1957. So I've also been keeping track, every day, of how many seats the forecast expects to go to different combinations of parties that could plausibly form governing coalitions. I'm currently tracking six possible coalitions:

  • the traditional center-right coalition of the CDU/CSU and the FDP;
  • the "Jamaika" coalition of the CDU/CSU, the FDP, and the Greens;
  • the "Halfghanistan" coalition of the CDU/CSU and Greens (I've made that nickname up myself; you're welcome);
  • the grand coalition of the CDU/CSU and SPD, currently in government;
  • the "traffic light" coalition of the SPD, FDP, and Greens; and
  • the traditional center-left or "Christmas" coalition of the SPD and Greens.

These are the six coalitions most likely to form, and not even all of these seem at all likely to reach an agreement; I'm just keeping track of them. The following graph shows, over time for each party, the probability that they will numerically comprise a majority of the Bundestag:

At the moment, the forecast thinks the next government will most likely have to include both the CDU/CSU and the Greens, and another party might also be required to form a majority. Note that this does not at all account for the likelihood of the named parties actually reaching an agreement; it's just keeping track of whether they could form a majority from a numerical standpoint. Since there's overlap between the parties, there's also no need for the probabilities to sum to 100%.

Clone this wiki locally