State election in Bremen 2007
The election for Bremen citizenship in 2007 in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen was the only election for a German state parliament that year. It took place on May 13, 2007 . The members of the 17th legislative period were elected . The 16th legislative period of the Bremen citizenship ended on June 7, 2007. Around 483,000 eligible voters were called to vote in the two electoral areas City of Bremen and City of Bremerhaven . The turnout was 57.58 percent, the historically lowest in an election for Bremen citizenship.
In the elective area of the city of Bremen, the composition of the 22 advisory councils there (330 members in total) was voted on at the same time .
| Political party | Top candidate in the election campaign |
|---|---|
|
 Jens Boehrnsen
|
|
 Thomas Röwekamp
|
|
 Karoline Linnert
|
|
 Peter Erlanson
|
.svg)
|
 Magnus Buhlert
|
|
Siegfried Tittmann |
Parties
A total of 13 parties were available for election.
The SPD , the CDU , the Greens , the Left. , the FDP , the DVU and Bremen must live were eligible for election throughout the country, while DIE FRAUEN , the PBC and the REP could only be elected in Bremen. BIW , Germany and Die Weissen only stood for election in Bremerhaven .
Campaign issues
Important campaign topics were unemployment and the indebtedness of the state of Bremen as well as the related austerity measures to reorganize the budget (which was represented by politicians of the SPD and CDU, in particular with reference to the defense of Bremen's independence as a separate state). With these two issues, the situation for the state of Bremen had deteriorated further, despite appropriate political measures to remedy the situation.
Further topics were the minimum wage , education policy (in particular the care of children and young people in day-care centers and all-day schools , as well as the further financing of the University of Bremen and the question of tuition fees ), various questions about the administration of municipal hospitals, environmental and transport policy, as well Child poverty and neglect (here in particular looking back at the "Kevin case", because of which Senator Karin Röpke resigned in October 2006 ).
Another decisive factor was the political evaluation of the grand coalition of SPD and CDU, which had ruled the state of Bremen without interruption for twelve years until the election.
Top candidates
The top candidates of the six parties represented in the Bremen citizenship according to the official election result are shown in the table above. Surveys before the election showed that around 53 percent of those eligible to vote would vote Jens Böhrnsen and only 19.5 percent Thomas Röwekamp if a direct election of the mayor were possible.
Results
The official final result with the distribution of the 83 seats is shown below.
| Political party | be right | percent | Compared to 2003 (percentage points) |
Seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPD | 101,290 | 36.72 | - 5.6 | 32 |
| CDU | 70,728 | 25.64 | - 4.1 | 23 |
| Green | 45,493 | 16.49 | + 3.6 | 14th |
| The left. | 23,282 | 8.44 | + 6.7 | 7th |
| FDP | 16,486 | 5.98 | + 1.8 | 5 |
| DVU | 7,536 | 2.73 | + 0.4 | 1 |
| The conservatives | 4,462 | 1.62 | - | - |
| BIW | 2,336 | 0.85 | - | 1 |
| REP | 1,430 | 0.52 | - | - |
| THE WOMEN | 1,318 | 0.48 | + 0.1 | - |
| PBC | 952 | 0.35 | ± 0 | - |
| Germany | 333 | 0.12 | - | - |
| The whites | 170 | 0.06 | - | - |
Despite a loss of almost 20,000 votes, the SPD remained the strongest force in Bremen, but achieved - after 1995 - its second worst result in the state elections. Her previous coalition partner, the CDU, also suffered severe losses (almost 16,000 votes) and achieved the worst result since 1987.
In contrast to the previous coalition partner, there was no official coalition statement from the SPD in advance . After the election, SPD top candidate Böhrnsen said he only wanted to negotiate a possible coalition with the CDU and the Greens.
Relative election winners were the Greens with the best result ever in a state election; their previous record was 13.9% in the Hamburg state election in 1997 . The Left Party moved into a state parliament for the first time in the 10 " old federal states " and the FDP succeeded in returning to parliamentary groups after three legislative periods.
The election was particularly important for federal politics because of the future government coalition: With the end of the coalition between the SPD and CDU in Bremen, the grand coalition ruling Berlin lost the two-thirds majority in the Bundesrat, which was necessary to amend the constitution .
particularities
- A special feature of the citizenship elections is that, according to the state election law, the city of Bremen and the city of Bremerhaven are considered two separate electoral areas. To move into the citizenry, it is enough to jump the five percent hurdle in one of the two cities. In this way, the DVU managed one more time to move into the Bremen state parliament via the route in Bremerhaven, and also for the first time the citizens in anger.
- THE LEFT. came together as a merger of the Bremen WASG and the Bremen PDS . In earlier township elections she ran under the name PDS.
Coalition negotiations
After coalition talks with the CDU and the Greens, the SPD leaders in Bremen voted for a red-green coalition shortly after the election . The CDU in Bremen had previously announced that it would join the opposition . The SPD top candidate Böhrnsen said that the "high level of agreement in the social field" was the decisive factor for the Greens.
The SPD and the Greens then decided to start coalition negotiations at separate state party congresses with overwhelming majorities. The SPD also criticized the former coalition partner CDU.
The SPD and the Greens successfully concluded their talks on forming a government at the beginning of June 2007 and agreed on a joint coalition agreement.
The new state parliament was constituted on June 28, 2007 and the new Senate was elected on June 29.
Judicial review of the election
The voters' association Citizens in Anger initially received 4.998 percent of the vote in Bremerhaven. With 44,336 valid votes in Bremerhaven, the five percent hurdle was 2216.8 votes, so that BIW, for which 2,216 Bremerhaven residents voted, was missing a single vote to exceed the hurdle and thus a seat in the citizenship. The voters' association then appealed against the election. In November a court order was given to count the votes due to “relevant errors” in the election for the Bremerhaven area. Both the state returning officer and the BIW appealed against this decision to the State Court of Justice . This decided on May 22, 2008 that a repeat election was necessary in a constituency. There the chairman of the original electoral committee had packed the election documents and rode unaccompanied by bike to the premises of the Bremerhaven electoral authority, where an unresponsive new electoral committee had counted the votes. In addition, the result had to be corrected in two other constituencies.
The re-election was scheduled for July 6, 2008, the BIW achieved 27.6% of the valid votes cast in the affected electoral district, now came to 5.29% in the entire Bremerhaven electoral area and moved into the citizenship.
After the elections, doubts arose as to whether the BIW chairman Jan Timke and the later city councilor Annefriede Laue could even be elected. The Bremerhaven District Court issued a penalty order against Annefriede Laue for fraudulent voting , which Laue contradicted and which therefore did not become legally binding. Timke was acquitted by the district court in January 2009 after several days of trial of the charge of election fraud , after the public prosecutor had also requested an acquittal.
See also
literature
- State Statistical Office Bremen: Statistical communications. Issue 110, May 2007 ( PDF; 1.95 MB )
Web links
- Citizenship election 2007 in Bremen on wahlrecht.de, May 13, 2007 (with updates)
- Website of the Wahl-O-Mats for the election of the Bremen citizenship in 2007
Footnotes
- ↑ Citizenship elections (Landtag) 1947 to 2007 according to electoral areas ( Memento from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) State Statistical Office Bremen (PDF, 32.3 kB)
- ↑ Wahl ABC 2007. (PDF; 272 kB) page 20. (No longer available online.) Statistik.bremen.de, archived from the original on January 31, 2012 ; Retrieved May 15, 2011 .
- ↑ What is the advisory board doing in the district? on the website of the city of Bremen
- ↑ Full name: Die Weissen - Democratic Alternative
- ↑ Press release of the regional returning officer: Election for the Bremen citizenship on May 13, 2007: Final result announced again (PDF; 34 kB). July 10, 2008
- ^ Spiegel Online : Federal Council: Coalition loses two-thirds majority in red-green . May 13, 2007
- ^ Die Zeit : Coalition negotiations: Bremen turns red-green . May 20, 2007
- ↑ Focus : Bremen: The comeback of red-green . May 20, 2007
- ↑ Spiegel Online : Red-Green in Bremen: Böhrnsen accounts with the CDU . May 24, 2007
- ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : Bremen: Red-green is coming . June 16, 2007
- ^ Election Examination Court of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen: Az: WK 1819/07 - decision ( Memento from January 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). November 19, 2007
- ↑ wahlrecht.de: Bremerhaven threatens a repeat election farce . May 6, 2008 (with supplements)
- ↑ Press release of the Senator for the Interior and Sport of May 27, 2008.
- ^ Wahlrecht.de: Bremerhaven: Citizens elected in anger in the state parliament . July 6, 2008
- ↑ Wilko Zicht: Bremerhaven: citizens elected in anger in the state parliament. In: Suffrage. July 6, 2008, accessed November 6, 2007 .
- ^ Allegation of election fraud: MP Timke acquitted. In: WELT ONLINE. January 28, 2009, accessed April 6, 2009 .
