I’ve added some qoutes from the article

published: 10.16.24

The article is almost a month old.

Eventually, yes. But we are not quite there yet. In January Scholz will face a vote of no confidence, which he is unlikely to win. At this point all parties may try to find new governing majorities within the current makeup of the Bundestag, our parliament. This is also extremely unlikely to succeed (not with only a few months left in the term anyway). And then a snap election is called

It’s worse than that. The numbers I originally posted was only the exit poll. Now we have a preliminary result and it’s not looking good.

Here are the results:

Parties with less than 5% of the vote share don’t get any seats (there are exceptions but these don’t apply here, resulting in this makeup of state parliament:

You need 45 seats to have a governing majority. SPD and CDU together have only 44. There is no majority without either the fascists from the AFD or the tankies from the BSW.

It’s projected from the actual (then still unfinished) count but I think it uses some data from the exit polls to fill in the gap. So both?

We now have a preliminary official result. You can see it here: Saxony, Thuringia

@barsoap@lemm.ee has explained the basics of our electoral system pretty well: The first vote (Erststimme) is towards a candidate in a FPTP system to represent an electoral district and the second vote (Zweitstimme) for a party in a closed list proportional representative system. A party nominates a bunch of candidates and ranks them on a list. If they get enough votes to get a certain number of seats then those get filled first with candidates elected by Erststimme and then with candidates from the list starting at the top.

A party needs to win at least 5% of the Zweitstimme or win at least 3 seats using the Erststimme to be awarded any seats. This was done as a lesson from Weimar Germany where too many small parties made coalition building impossible which helped Hitlers rise to power.

But what if a party gets more seats via Erststimme than they should have? In that case we just start adding seats until the proportionality is maintained (those seats are referred to as Überhangs- und Ausgleichsmandate). That has lead to ballooning parliaments with our national parliament the Bundestag (small pronunciation guide: Bundes-tag not Bunde-stag - compound words can be tricky) being one of the biggest, right behind China. Recent reforms should curb that. We’ll see next year how well they work.

Here is the (non final) result for anyone to lazy to check themselves:

Maybe? But I am not that cynical. I think the answer is actually both easier and more complicated. The US’ public position has always (or at least for a long time) been support for a two state solution. And I don’t think the Democrats are capable enough of convincingly lying for this to be untrue. Someone would have leaked something etc. Plus it plays into their compromise fetish. And to satisfy that it helps to actually have some land for the second state left. That’s the easy part.

The complicated part is in understanding why they keep sending weapons. I think Dems have genuinely convinced themself that if they didn’t arm Israel, Hamas would wipe them out. And for a two state solution it helps to keep the first state around. So they keep sending weapons but they also want everybody to know that they are really disappointed whenever Israel uses them to kill civilians. Plus Biden thinks he can push Netanjahu more effectively if he stays on his good side. That’s the “hug Bibi” strategy. I think we have more than enough evidence that the strategy doesn’t work.

Also there is a difference between “enough weapons to level Gaza” and “enough weapons to secure the border”. And maybe someone should tell the people in charge of weapon shipments.

White House staffers even have a nickname for it. It’s called the “hug Bibi strategy” which reportedly has been in place since the Obama administration.

So I think the reports are accurate. Biden seems to think publicly supporting Israel is the best way to arrive at a ceasefire. Of course doing something ineffective and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.

What complicates matters is that there are actually good reasons to supply Israel with some military equipment. Many Israelis are living there in 3rd or sometimes 4th generation. Putting the let’s call it complicated circumstances of Israels founding aside, they are a people and deserve self-determination (just like the Palestinians do). The often repeated line “Israel has the right to defend itself” is not only a line it’s also true. You can’t just cut them of from all military assistance. So any policy is going to look kind of contradictory.

All of this isn’t me defending the Biden administration. It’s just me pointing out, that a substantially different policy would look very similar. You would hear a lot of “friends tell friends the truth” and Israel would only get the weapons they actually need to DEFEND itself (iron dome missiles etc.)

And that’s something they should definitely do

Then you should probably file an issue on github about it. That seems like a relatively easy problem to fix. And I agree that is a too large amount of white space.

This is what it looks like on thunder