restart?

Politics

A new day, a new week, a new government. We woke up to a not too disastrous election result. 80.5% of people who could vote turned out, these number are also reflected in Berlin and my ward (even higher at 81.5%). That's pretty good, people are still interested and engage. The German parliament has 630 seats. The SPD  (120 seats) and Greens (85 seats) lost bitterly. As did the FDP who got kicked out. I do think the FDP behaved absolutely despicably torpedoing their own coalition partners. The CDU won the elections with a 164 seats in parliament. A nice surprise was that the Linke got in nicely with 64 seats (8.8% of 2nd votes). In fact they are the strongest party in Berlin. In my ward the Green won the direct vote by 0.1% over the CDU. The BSW didn't make it which means there is the option for a CDU/SPD coalition government. Oh, and there is the AfD which got far too many votes and ended up 2nd strongest party with 152 seats.

People clearly care about the election. They also care about social issues, For some reason they massively voted AfD thinking that they will do something in their interest. The CDU made far too many populist statements. Hopefully they will tune down the populism and the SPD can get some of the social aspects through. I fear the SPD will get the blame, things get worse and next time even more people will vote AfD.

Meanwhile all the environmental and social issues rage on while the Americans are taking a hard right exit and the Ukraine is still getting hammered. The next few years will be absolutely crucial.