Yesterday, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled on the constitutionality of Germany’s biggest broadcaster, telling parties to keep away. Plus there is a spoof video in this post.
Much has been said about the Front National’s performance in yesterday’s local elections, but not yet by everyone. Here is a bunch of useful links to bring your punditry up to scratch.
Thanks to the generosity of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, we are fielding a telephone survey on European and national identities. Our CATI studio runs on open source software, in the cloud. No, we are not exactly risk-adverse.
Here is a nice little conundrum for you: Can you say something relevant about politics, parties and political culture while staying absolutely neutral? And what do you do when your editor thinks you’ve crossed the line while you fail to see their point? Also featuring Red Hesse (or maybe not).
Germany’s Constitutional Court just killed the electoral threshold for European Elections. Here is the backstory, i.e. my random thoughts on the issue.
This week, guest-blogging at the LSE’s very useful European Politics and Policy blog: Why I think that the AfD’s likely success in the 2014 European election will give them a foothold in the German system.
The AfD may be Germany’s new eurosceptic party, but their short manifesto is primarily concerned with Germany and German politics. Here is the wordle to prove it.
By and large, the online “Green Primary” ahead of the Euro 2014 election was a failure. Deutsche Welle has a short feature on this experiment, in which I give my five (Euro) cent. Der Beitrag zur “Primary” ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar. Photo by DBarefoot
Somewhat foolishly, my university has granted me access to Mogon: not the god, not the death metal band but rather their supercomputer, which currently holds the 182th spot in the top 500 list of the fastest computers on the planet. It has some 34,000+ cores and more than 80 TB of RAM, but basically it’s just a very large bunch of Linux boxes. That means that I have a rough idea how to handle it, and that it happily runs my native Linux Stata and MPlus (and hopefully Jags) binaries for me. It also has R installed, and this is where my misery began.
Germany’s ultra right-wing NPD is the party that never fails to amaze. After leader Holger Apfel was forced to resign over the (alleged) harassment of ‘young comrades’ just before Christmas, his predecessor Udo Voigt made it clear that he wanted his old job back. But Udo Pastörs (what is it about this name?), who helped…