Eyebrow Raising Story of the Week

[Octavious]

You'd think, what with one thing and another, the world of politics would have lost its ability to surprise... And then this happened

Romeo, a social network for gay, bisexual, queer and transgender people, surveyed 60,000 of its German members to get an idea of their voting intentions. The results were not what you might expect

https://www.romeo.com/en/blog/election-survey-results/

All Participants (60,560 votes)
17.6% (10,674) – CDU / CSU
27.9% (16,912) – AfD
12.5% (7,574) – SPD
19.9% (12,077) – GRÜNE
3.6% (2,165) – FDP
4.5% (2,749) – BSW
6.5% (3,907) – LINKE
1.4% (877) – FREIE WÄHLER
3.1% (1,856) – Volt
2.9% (1,769) – Others

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

I imagine Romeo skews young and male, which would help to explain outsized support for both AfD and the Greens.

AfD is certainly criticized by some LGBT folks, but it also has a prominent lesbian leader.

I wonder if the AfD is seen as the party taking the homophobic attitudes of some immigrant groups seriously? I'm not super familiar with Germany and am mostly extrapolating from the Canadian context, where this dynamic has endeared some LGBT folks to federal and provincial Conservative parties.

[Jamiet99uk]

AfD's position on LGBT issues is very confused, and confusing.

The Party's leader is openly gay and is in a same-sex relationship with a non-white person. And yet their voting record at both a regional and national level is very, very heavily anti-LBGT rights.

[Jamiet99uk]

From what I am reading Bert is right - Romeo's userbase is predominantly young white gay men. So being gay is only one element of the demographic here.

[flash2015]

People have many identities/social groupings...whether it be race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, conservative vs. liberal values, rural vs. urban, over or under for the toilet paper roll etc. I think it is often too easy to many assumptions about what people will identify strongest with.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

AfD's position on LGBT issues is very confused, and confusing.

The Party's leader is openly gay and is in a same-sex relationship with a non-white person. And yet their voting record at both a regional and national level is very, very heavily anti-LBGT rights.

Reading more about this, it is undeniably confusing.

I can see how many of the AfD’s positions might appeal to Andrew Sullivan-style homosexual conservatives—those wary of "gender ideology" and skeptical of a certain brand of rainbow identity politics.

But it’s much harder to understand why such individuals would also support a party that has consistently voted against gay marriage and adoption rights.

Flash’s point about people having complex and sometimes contradictory identities is clearly valid. Still, it must involve a deep internal conflict for, say, a young gay German man to align himself with a party whose policies suggest that he is unfit for family life.

[Octavious]

Oh, absolutely. You can't throw everyone who happen to share a particularly trait into the same basket. You can usually expect, however, to be able to make some fairly safe assumptions. Indeed, if you look at their data from a similar survey for the British elections of last year (all be it a far smaller sample size) you find a set of results that are not surprising in the least. The contrast between last year's British results and this year's German results is truly remarkable