« Karl Rove and the German Election | Main | Linkspartei: The Untouchables »

September 22, 2005

Comments

Andy Lang

That's quite bizarre. Thuringia is was a Nazi Hochburg before '33, and that's why Bauhaus had to get out of Dodge, i.e., Weimar. Fritz Sauckel was Gauleiter and his Gau headquarters in Weimar is still standing as a reminder of that period. Not to mention Buchenwald.

But that's ancient history. Thuringia is overwhelmingly Protestant except for the Catholic enclave around Erfurt. There are about 200,000 Roman Catholics compared to 500,000 Lutherans. It's not exactly fertile soil for creationism, I would think.

But it's also the land where wurst was invented. If that's not evidence of intelligent design, I don't know what is.

It's hard to imagine what Althaus would be up to. You're right that his performance in the federal election was a spectacular failure. The CDU in Thuringia ran its own campaign specifically to draw voters away from the Left Party: they covered the state with posters imitating the old PDS graphics and hitting them on issue after issue. But it was all useless: the Left and the SPD surged ahead of the CDU and together collected 56 percent of the vote, while the CDU's share collapsed by 40 percent compared to its 2004 Landtag election.

Fortunately for Althaus, he's got another four years in office and a narrow (2-seat) but stable majority.

The comments to this entry are closed.

My Photo
Blog powered by Typepad