ARD updated their exit poll.

BSW and FDP really really close to making it

🇩🇪🗳 - Worst SPD performance since 1887.

🇩🇪 - CDU's Friedrich Merz declares victory.

🇩🇪🗳 - CDU vampirised a lot of SPD, FDP and never-voters.

However, it has hemorraged a significant amount of voters towards the AfD

The "CDU getting votes from disgruntled AfD voters" rhetoric is dead and buried.

🇩🇪 - SPD's Olaf Scholz acknowledges a "bitter defeat".

🇻🇦 - Pope Francis remains in critical condition, with blood tests showing mild signs of kidney failure.

— CNN/Vatican

🇩🇪🗳 - Mass voter mobilization "stunted the AfD's capacities to surprise"

>Never been a more active german election
>mass surprise turnout to counter the AfD
>the AfD still has the exact same scores as predicted by the polls

Yeah their momentum is nowhere near broken

🇩🇪🗳 - AfD is the second party for under 25.

Die Linke is first by 5pts, with the Big Two CDU / SPD struggling at 12-13 along Greens

🇩🇪🗳 - On the left, young women in cities. On the right, old men in rural areas

Over 50% of german urbanite women vote for the immigrationnist parties. Some jokes write themselves.

>be a young woman under 25 in Hamburg
>see this disabled black speaker at a Die Linke rally between trans speakers and arabic ones
>they call for a stand against fascism and open european borders despite immigrants factually being more intolerant and violent than any other categories
>vote for this with no remorse
>doesn't understand why men want to revoke women voting rights

🇩🇪🗳 - AfD somehow taking votes from all parties and only losing a fraction to the leftist nationalists is a case to be studied.

A giant portion of new votes are from people who were not voting anymore or who never voted however.

Die Linke's over-performance is tied to the SPD trying to maintain its momentum for years by getting progressive.

The collapse of the SPD is seen clearly as all the voters flock elsewhere (CDU as returning centrists disgruntled by the progressiveness and towards Die Linke for progressists disgruntled by the centrist / pro-ukrainian aspect of SPD)

🇩🇪🗳 - Results "not final" until the very late hours of the evening as EVERYTHING hinges on whether the FDP and BSW get into the Parliament.

If neither enter, it's an easy coalition between CDU and SPD that could hold for a while.

If BSW or FDP enter, it could get way harder to find a working coalition.

If both enter, I'd bet we get new elections by the end of the year.

The Cuban government has suspended operations until 25 February amid continuing power outages across the island nation. At least 57% of Cuban territory, including parts of the capital Havana, are without power today.

The outages come amid an ongoing fuel shortage, as well as chronic under-investment and lack of maintenance on key electrical systems. The latter has resulted in the recent closure of 11 of Cuba’s 20 thermoelectric plants for emergency maintenance. The government expects the shortages to continue until at least 2 March.

🇩🇪 - According to latest estimations, the turnout in today’s elections was 83.5%, 7.1% higher than in 2021. This has likely prevented AfD from reaching higher levels of support.

- Das Erste