Hamburg in Germany has had local elections. Despite a moderate drop in support, the Social Democrats are clearly in the lead there. The Conservative CDU also fell in support, as did the far-right AfD and the right-liberal FDP, both of which barely clung to the threshold for entering the parliament. The big winners were the Greens, who more than doubled their vote share since last election and are now clearly the second placed party.
The next European election to come up is Slovakia, next weekend. The Social Democrats seem likely remain the largest party, with a hugely split field of parties beneath them ranging from the new liberal-left alliance PS/SPOLU to a bunch of not-even-really-hiding-it fascists. It'll be a tight race for second and likely a very long and complex coalition formation process.
Elsewhere in the world, recent run-down: The Aam Admi, an anti-corruption populist party, have held their lock on Delhi's municipal elections, they're very strong there and basically don't function at a national level or anywhere else much. Peru had a parliamentary election which delivered a split result with a lot of centrists and populists, which appears to be due to dissatisfaciton with the older parties amid the president pushing for anti-corruption reforms.
In less democratic news, Iran had elections on a very low turnout which delivered an overwhelming result for the conservative wing (bear in mind this is conservative by Islamic Republic of Iran standards). Urban turnout which tends to favour reformists was especially disastrously bad. Togo changed the law a while back to let its nationalist president stand for more terms, he's won his third term this week with over 70% of the vote and major opposition claims of election rigging. In other rigged elections, the presidential party in Azerbaijan also returned to office with a huge majority.
