there is the contention that the CDU is losing the cities i.e. the young urban voters to the greens. Why should anyone vote for them - who are they? Also their 'modernization' strategy is not working but hurting.

_{Schengen is toast!}

Apparently "freedom" is a good thing when used by little places like Jersey or the Caymans.

Otherwise, bad.

some points the Econo-Mist failed to mention:

•  Klimahaus is germany's museum to climate issues, visited by school trips almost every day of the school year, from all over. But climate issues aren't all that important to support, from the magazine's perspective.

•  The Ausswandern Museen (Museum of Emigration?) documents the huge role the ports of Bremen and Bremerhaven played as the main embarkation point for emigration, and is also used as a center for people wishing to find evidence of the forebearers. Of course, also visited by schools from all over northern 'Schland.

•  Bremen has spent significant funds setting up the infrastructure as the main staging area for the German offshore wind industry. Not a small point, as the needs for turbine, tower and foundation manufacture, including large rotor blades, as well as storage and and shipping centers. The workers come from all over Niedersachsen. (Other smaller centers exist as well, for example in Cuxhaven or Emden.

•  Bremerhaven is the global shipping center for the Mercedes production in Bremen, and who knows what else. Much city-built infrastructure there as well.

•  Along the Weser between Bremen and Bremerhaven is the center for the production of the yachts needed for Saudi princes and various oligarchs. the econo-Mist could have mentioned that except it might have riled the hoi-polloi.

Propaganda becomes so sophisticated. Perhaps they should have told of the origins of Bremen, as the first free trade city in the world, and the first to obtain freedom from the kings.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

• The survival of the Left Party, even if with losses, is quite noteworthy. In the previous regional elections, Bremen was the first West German state where the Left Party entered parliament, and this Left Swing In Bremen led to a big scare in business media. But the 'optimists' hoped that the Bremen Left Party is a disorderly enough bunch to descend into hopeless squabbles and inconsistent policymaking to not survive the next elections – well that hope was quashed. And the survival is the more noteworthy given the circumstances: With the energy debate looming large in Germany, there is a trend for leftish progressives to want to empower the surging Greens. Two months ago this already prevented the Left Party from entering two of the three last West German state parliaments it wasn't represented in (Baden-Württenberg and Rhineland-Palatinate). I hope the surviving Bremen Left Party can have a loud voice as the SPD and Greens are pushed down the austerity route.

• I don't know much about Citizens in Anger, only that the local group used to be part of the onetime Schill party (founded by a law-and-order judge in Hamburg who first got media attention with US-style frivolous rulings, then entered politics, then got into the city government, then sank in a string of corruption and cocaine scandals) but then was taken over by a similar outfit from Berlin, and that they are strong (above 7%) in Bremerhafen (hence the single representative).

• CDU: I wonder how much of their loss was owed to an apparent swiftboating campaign by Bild, Germany's equivalent of the Sun. The CDU put up an election poster showing the mayor candidate and two workers with port facilities in the background. Bild then interviewed some port workers expressing outrage over the CDU's use of "fake port workers". Now the CDU protested that they never claimed that the workers are port workers, and named the two guys to demonstrate that they weren't fakes but actual workers who get into the port on their jobs, but it was too late, and indeed the triumphant SPD mayor included "we don't use fake port workers on our posters like some" in his celebratory speech. But what's interesting here is why a right-populist rag attacks the CDU. One possibility is opposition to the strategy attempted by the local CDU: they tried for a liberal image, with the mayoral candidate going as far as visiting some gay-lesbian event.

• As indicated upthread, the big question in the German media is the future of the CDU. At the same time Merkel plays an ultra-damaging role in the Euro crisis and even instrumentalises anti-Southerner racist stereotypes to secure her government majority in parliament, she is still the leader of the 'moderniser' camp within her party (who want to move to the center and shed social conservatism to survive generational change) in a pitched battle against the conservatives. Despite the apparent success of Bild's apparent scheme, so far the Bremen debacle seems to have been inconclusive, with both sides claiming a proof of their thesis (modernisers: "see we lose the cities to the Greens if we don't modernise"; conservatives: "see we don't gain in the cities if we pretend to be Greens, but are in danger to lose the countryside").

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Piraten holding the national trend at about 2%, even with (or because of) the seizure of the party's servers two days before the election.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

For the record, the final preliminary result – with a one-seat shift from Greens to the Left Party:

Party	%	Δ	Seats	Δ
Turnout/total	55.9%	-2.7	83	±0
SPD (Social Democrats)	38.6%	+1.9	36	+4
Greens	22.5%	+6.0	21	+7
CDU (Christian Democrats)	20.3%	-5.3	20	-3
Left Party (hard left)	5.6%	-2.8	5	-2
BIW (Citizens In Anger; law-and-order right-populist)	3.7%	+2.9	1	±0
FDP (Free Democrats; neoliberals)	2.4%	-3.6	0	-5
Pirate Party (information freedom)	1.9%	+	0	±0
NPD (neo-Nazi far-right)	1.6%	+	(-1.1)	(-1)

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}