German Election Results

The Social Democrats (SPD) narrowly beat Angela Merkel's CDU party in yesterday's federal elections in Germany. Although the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) appear to have come a close second, the rise in popularity of some of the other political parties means that the CDU achieved their worst ever election return.

You can explore the election results across Germany on the Berliner Morgenpost's Bundestagwahl 2021 interactive map. This map colors each electoral district to show the party with the highest votes. You can also select each individual political party individually to view how the party performed in every single electoral district. The Berliner Morgenpost's map shows a clear geographical north-south divide with the SPD proving the most popular party in the north and the CDU performing best in the south of the country.

The extreme right-wing German Nationalist party AfD was the most popular party in a number of electoral districts in the former East Germany. The Green party was the most popular party in a few electoral districts in some of the larger cities, such as Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt.

The Berliner Morgenpost has also created a very detailed map of the results in every one of Berlin's 1507 electoral wards. The Bundestagwahl Berlin 2021 map provides an extremely detailed view of how each party performed at the neighborhood level in the capital. The Berliner Morgenpost maps were created by the Funke Interaktiv data visualization team of the the Funke Media Group. They have also created very detailed interactive maps for their local newspapers in Hamburg and Thuringia. 

The German newspaper Zeit has also published an interactive map which shows the national German election results. Zeit's Bundestagwahl 2021 map colors each electoral district to show the level of support of the leading political party. The newspaper has also published small multiples maps to show how each of the six political parties performed across every district. These individual maps allow you to explore how each party performed across the whole of the country. For example the AfD and Linke both performed best in electoral districts in the former East Germany. Conversely the CDU appears to have achieved its least number of votes in districts in the former East Germany.

Hat-tip: Lisa Muth has been compiling links to some of the best data visualizations of the German election results on this Twitter thread (I have written only about some of the maps mentioned in this thread)