[fabian2k]

German elections are much less tactical and significantly more boring than US elections. The US system creates much bigger swings based on small differences and creates much more of a narrative around campaign strategies. In Germany you pretty much just look at one poll for all parties and the popularity of the potential chancellors, but that's it.

[corty]

The election is also far less influential, because there will always be a coalition in power, where sometimes single-seat differences (often resulting from weird specialties of the election system like Ueberhangmandate and Ausgleichsmandate) decide on the (non-)viability of some option.

And all the election programme of a party is very much up for discussion in coalition talks: A famous example of a coalition compromise: 2005 SPD promised "leave VAT at 16%", CDU promised "VAT raise to 18%". Their compromise? raise VAT to 19%.

The election is the boring part, the talks right after the election decide what will happen.

[hackeraccount]

My favorite example of that is from 1909; Churchill describing the number of battleships to be built.

“The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.”

[majewsky]

We had a famous case of this in the German federal election of 2005. The conservatives (CDU/CSU) wanted to increase sales tax by 1%, the social democrats (SPD) were opposed to increasing it at all. They ended up forming a coalition that raised the sales tax by 3%.

[denkquer]

this isn't a bad thing

[fabian2k]

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I like boring and reliable elections with more than two choices. But I suspect that this also means that there is simply not that much interest for a 538-like site in Germany.