Friday, March 14, 2014
Empire (Omni Shoreham)
his paper examines the impact of party system change in Germany on the role, status and power of the two catch-all parties (the CDU/CSU and SPD) in the light of the 2013 Federal election. It builds upon arguments put forward about the 2009 Federal election in my 2012 Party Politicsarticle and argues that party system change continues to exercise a paradoxical impact. On the one hand, the decline in the overall catch-all vote appears to have been halted, at least temporarily. On the other, the failure of the Free Democrats (FDP) to scale the 5 per cent hurdle and subsequent presence of only two small parties (Left Party, Greens) in the Bundestag means that the coalition formation game is constrained, with only three feasible connected winning coalitions. This reduces the choices available to the catch-all parties. In examining changes in the German party system, the paper also examines the role of the recently formed and highly Eurosceptic ‘Alliance for Germany’ (AfD) and assesses its future prospects in the run-up to European parliament elections.
Reference:
Lees, C. ‘The paradoxical effects of decline: assessing party system change and the role of the Catch-all parties in Germany following the 2009 Federal election’, in Party Politics, Vol. 18 no. 4 (2012): 545-562.
