Jacob Christensen

Given that the four centre-right parties have won the majority in the new Swedish riksdag, it wasn’t surprising that Göran Persson would resign as leader of the Social Democratic Party during the coming electoral term.

What did surprise me was that he in his speech (at 23.00) not only made a clear admission of defeat but also immediately announced that he would resign as party leader in March 2007. The question now is how long it will take the Social Democrats to find a new party leader and how messy the procedure will be.

Oh, and as Sören Holmberg just commented: 2006 yielded the best election result for the Conservatives since 1928 and the worst result for the Social Democrats since the 1920s. The Danish Social Democrats would be ecstatic at the prospect of winning 35% of the vote – but then again the Danish left has consistently polled between 10-15% of the vote since the 1960s.

It’s 7.30 pm and the Danish media have their angle on the German state elections ready:

• Berlingske Tidende – Tyske ekstremister får kanonvalg (Exceptional backing for German extremists)
• Danmarks Radio – Højreekstremister valgt ind i delstatsparlament (Right-wing extremists enter state parliament)
• Jyllands-Posten – NPD valgt ind i østtysk delstatsparlament (NPD elected to East German state parliament)
• Politiken – Nynazister valgt ind i delstatsparlament (Neo-nazis elected to state parliament)
• TV2 Danmark – Godt delstatsvalg til højrefløj (Good election results for right-wing)

Question to Berlingske Tidende: When did 6,5% constitute an exceptional backing – especially given that the NPD managed to get nearly 10% of the vote in Sachsen?

The NPD are a nasty bunch of people but I understand if some Germans occasionally despair at the international press coverage of their country.

Update: At 22.40, ARD and ZDF have the NPD at 7,2 – 7,3%

The Social Liberal Party (Det radikale Venstre) and the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti) have held their annual conferences this weekend.

The Social Liberal Party – Marianne Jelved’s speech, Søren Bald’s speech, index of speeches. The SLP also has four quite ordinary delegates blogging about the conference. How 2005!

The Danish People’s Party – Agenda.

If you ask me kindly, I’ll get back to those. Eventually.

I’ll try to follow three elections this evening – besides the Swedish national and local elections – there has been state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Luckily, the polling stations close at 6 pm in Germany and the exit polls are usually fairly reliable.

The two German elections have two things in common: The turn-out has fallen some 10 percentage points (roughly from 70 to 60%) and the CDU has failed to present a credible challenge to the Red-Reg governments in both states. In Berlin, the Greens were the winners if we count be the share of the vote, while the Liberal FDP and the Neo-nazi NDP made major advances in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Another thing worth noting about Berlin is that the Linkspartei got whacked while a diverse selection of “other” parties received more than 12% of the vote without being represented in the state parliament.

Interesting question: Why do we see such dramatic drops in turn-out? One possible answer could be that dissatisfied voters didn’t see the CDU as an effective alternative in state politics, another that voters wouldn’t vote for the CDU because they were dissatisfied with the party’s performance in national politics. Finally, the abstentions could be seen as a manifestation of distrust in the political system as such. Closer inspection of the exit polls will tell us more during the evening.

ZDF’s coverage of the state elections: Berlin, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

ARD’s coverage of the state elections.

Well, I’ll be… We have a Japanese-style loudspeaker-car operated by the Social Democrats driving around the neighbourhood at the moment. I have never seen – or heard – anything like that before in Denmark or Sweden.

Just to be more precise: Operated by the Social Democratic Youth Association. But they were still loud.