Dominate Parties

When looking over the results of the recent election, I became curious about how the individual Länder voted. When I colored each Länder as the color of the party that won a plurality there, this is the map I got:

It shows a Germany dominated by the CDU, with Die Linke challenging them in the east and SPD reduced to a small holding in Bremen (Bremen is non-contiguous, which is why there are two red dots). This map reminds of basically every map from a Swedish election. Let's look at the 2006 results as an example:

Sweden is dominated by the Social Democrats and the Moderates are left with only a foothold in Stockholm. However, the Social Democrats actually lost this election. How is that possible? The Social Democrats are the largest party in Sweden by a mile, however, their opposition isn't just the Moderates, but rather The Alliance, a collection of four smaller parties. While individually, none of these parties can compete against the Social Democrats, together, these four parties were able to get more votes than the Social Democrats. So if we look the election as a battle between coalitions and not parties, we get this:

Well, it still looks like the Social Democrats dominate, but the areas won by the Alliance include the four largest cities in Sweden.

So what does this have to do with the Germany map? Like the Social Democrats, the CDU is now by far the largest party, so on a party versus party basis, they're hard to beat. That said, they only received 34% of the vote, so while they won pluralities in most Länder, the majority didn't vote for them. It is also one of the worst results that CDU has ever received, it's just that the SPD did so much more worse. Another problem is that the map also seems to overemphasis Die Linke. Despite winning plurality in two Länder, Die Linke is only the fourth largest party overall. So if SPD managed to win Bremen, what happened to the third largest party, FDP? This is more a matter of concentration of votes. There is no real FDP stronghold, they basically receive the same result everywhere, meaning they're never the smallest party, but they're also never the largest. Die Linke voters however are heavily concentrated in East Germany, so while their overall vote is kind of low, in select locations, their share of the vote is quite high.

So instead of looking at the results based on how the parties did, let's look at how the CDU/FDP Coalition did against the left-wing parties.

This map seems to better represent the actual result, which is that the vote was very close, with the CDU/FDP Coalition only winning with a plurality. In fact, the CDU/FDP Coalition only received a majority in just three Länder, winning the rest with just a plurality. So this was not exactly a crushing defeat for the German left. If the SPD ever decided to give up its objections to Die Linke, it could very well retake the German government.