At the tender age of 84, Ian Wachtmeister has died. In the early 1990s, he co-founded New Democracy, a short-lived and at times rather entertaining Swedish Radical Right outfit. Wachtmeister’s Wikipedia bio is here. Later in life (quite late in his case), he was somewhat close to the Sweden Democrats. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500"] Photo…
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:…
With less than two weeks until the election, we now have 153 surveys from seven different companies to pore over. The bulk of these (104) were produced by Emnid, Forsa and Insa. GMS and Allensbach have delivered only a handful of polls (seven and nine, respectively), while FGW (15) and Dimap (18) occupy the middle…
Eight months of polling While I was doing other stuff, elsewhere, the German polling industry has been busy. Over the last eight months, the big seven have published results from 144 surveys with a total of 266,715 respondents. With just three weeks to go until election day (and postal voting well underway, what can they…
The final polls for May are in, bringing the total number to 87. As in previous instances of this analysis, the bulk of the data comes from Emnid, Forsa, and INSA. As always, it would be great to have more data from the other companies to play with. Pollster n allensbach 5 8 dimap 10…