I posted some information about elections that took place in Denmark, last Thursday, and are taking place in the city state of Berlin, Germany, tomorrow, in the comments section of the open thread, and David suggested I post them as a separate Diary - so here goes!
Denmark
Last Thursday there were elections in Denmark.
There are eight parliamentary parties in mainland Denmark, which are divided in two blocks: a right-of-centre block made up of rightwing-liberals, the far right Danish People's Party, conservatives and a new libertarian-minded party that first entered parliament four years ago; and a left-of-centre block made up of social-democrats, socialists, social-liberals and a far-left party.
These parties took 175 of the 179 seats in the Danish parliament - the additional 4 are elected in Greenland and the Faroer, which have their own political party landscapes.
The left-of-centre block won the elections last Thursday, and will likely now form the next government, for the first time since 2001. In Denmark proper, the margin was razor-thin (50.2% for the left vs. 49.8% for the right) and yielded a 3-seat lead for the left, but the left's parliamentary majority will be padded to 5 thanks to the largely left-leaning sympathies of the Greenland/Faroer representatives. In the last elections, the right led by 53% to 46% in mainland Denmark, and had a parliamentary majority of 11.
The left block won despite a lacklustre result for the social-democrats, who lost a little more ground still compared to their already unimpressive result four years ago. The 25% of the vote they got this time was their worst result since 1909 or so. The winners on the left were the social-liberals and the far-left Unity List -- which might cause some tension in an upcoming left-of-centre government, since they are on opposing ends of the left-wing spectre. (The social-liberals are culturally very liberal, but economically moderate.)
On the right, Prime Minister Rasmussen's Liberals made ever so slight gains and got 27% of the vote, while the Danish People's Party lost a percent or two, which is comforting news at a time when the far-right seems to be on the upswing everywhere else. The Conservatives lost half of their vote though, and their losses were only partly absorbed by the up-and-coming liberaltarians of the Liberal Alliance.
News story at the European Voice
Exact election results at Wikipedia
Great background information about the Danish parties at the always-impressive World Elections blog
EDIT: World Elections now also has an extensive analysis of the election results up, including maps.
Berlin, Germany
There are elections for the parliament of the city state of Berlin this weekend, and the results look to be interesting.
Social-democratic Mayor Klaus Wowereit is quite popular. The Greens parachuted one of their national party leaders, Renate Kunast, into the race to challenge him at a time when polls seemed to suggest a neck-and-neck race between the two parties, with the once-dominant Christian-Democrats fading into third place. But Wowereit (who is openly gay, by the way) seems to have easily won the election campaign. The last few polls had his social-democratic SPD at just over 30% of the vote, with the Christian-Democrats at just over 20% and the Greens at just under 20%. The Greens therefore look set to still improve significantly on their previous election results in the city (they got 13% last time), but get many fewer votes than the polls were suggesting a few months ago.
The Leftists - a coalition of East-German ex-communists and West-German disgruntled trade unionists and other leftwingers - have been polling at just over 10%, which is a far cry from the 20+% which the ex-communist PDS received ten years ago. This could be because the Leftists have been Wowereit's junior government partner, which has made them lose much of the independent, critical left-wing profile they combatively honed when they were in opposition. Or who knows, it could be a sign that the "Ostalgia" and the resentment of the city's "Ossis" vis-a-vis the know-it-all yuppies from the Western half of the city is fading.
There's also a bonus chance of headlines for the digital-rights Pirate Party, according to the polls. Four of the five most recent opinion polls have the party crossing the 5% electoral threshold, with the last of them even improbably putting them at 9%.
If you don't remember, the Pirate Parties drew a fair bit of international press when a Pirate Party received 7% of the Swedish vote in the 2009 European Parliament elections. Subsequent electoral gains have been scarce, however: in the 2010 national elections in Sweden, for example, the Pirate Party received just 0.7% of the vote.
Pirate Parties did win a number of municipal council seats in Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain and Switzerland, and in the 2009 German national elections, it received 2.0% of the vote. It also received 2.1 % in 2011 elections in the German states of Baden-Württemberg and Hamburg, campaigning on opposition to new data retention and Internet filtering policies. But getting into the Berlin parliament would be the Pirate Parties' biggest coup since they first broke through in 2009.
By the way, if you've been adding up - yes, the numbers for the social-democrats, greens, leftists and pirates add up to 67-70% of the vote. There's a certain joy in saying: "hey, it's Berlin!", but even for Berlin this would be an unusually strong dominance for the left. In 2006 and 2001, the main leftwing parties pooled about 60% of the vote, and in 1999 only some 50%.
See the latest Berlin polls and previous results (in German, but fairly self-explanatory) at Wahlrecht.de