Last modified: 2005-11-05 by santiago dotor
Keywords: free voters bavaria | freie wähler bayern | fw | letters: 2 (blue) | sun (orange) | stripes: 2 (orange) | letters: 2 (green) |
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![[Free Voters Bavaria (Bavaria, Germany)]](../images/d/de}fwby.gif) |
image by Marcus Schmöger, 21 June 2002 |
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Beside the usual parties, independent, "party-free" lists take part in local elections, usually on a municipal and county level. As these are organized on a local level, and just loosely joint together in umbrella organizations, the names of these lists differ somewhat. They are called, for instance: Freie Wähler (Free Voters), Überparteiliche Wähler (Supra-Partisan Voters), Freie Wählergemeinschaft (Free Voters' Association) or the like. In more recent times the umbrella organizations, most notably the Free Voters Bavaria (Freie Wähler Bayern), have been trying to organize a tighter cooperation, and even discuss taking part in the next-higher level of elections, the elections to the Landtag (State Parliament). The German-wide umbrella organization calls itself simply Freie Wähler. The Freie Wähler are usually considered conservative, but they are mainly pragmatic, as the usual party ideologies do not easily fit into municipal politics. They frequently stress that their only "ideology" is that they are "not a party".
Although there are some local or even state-wide organizations in most of the German Länder, the Freie Wähler Bayern, founded in 1978, is the most important of the umbrella organizations. The Freie Wähler Bayern got 15,3% of the votes in the Bavarian communal elections in 2002, the third-largest share of votes after CSU and SPD. In the 1998 Landtag elections they got 3,2% of the votes and no seats.
Marcus Schmöger, 21 June 2002
Since 1988 the Freie Wähler Bayern used a common logo, that has been replaced by a new logo in 2001. The new logo features —beside the inscriptions "FW" and "Freie Wähler"— a sun, outlined in orange. (...) I was not sure if the new logo had been adopted for the flags as well, until I actually saw one at the 2002 Politische Aschermittwoch in Passau. The new flag (hanging flag) shows on a white field at the top the new logo —a sun outlined orange, the inscription "FW" in blueish grey, the inscription "Freie Wähler" in black— and at the bottom again the sun, somewhat larger.
Sources:
Marcus Schmöger, 21 June 2002
![[Free Voters Bavaria 1988-2001 (Bavaria, Germany)]](../images/d/de}fwby1.gif) |
image by Marcus Schmöger, 21 June 2002 |
Since 1988 the Freie Wähler Bayern used a common logo, that has been replaced by a new logo in 2001. (...) The old logo was used on flags (hanging flags) as well.
Sources:
Marcus Schmöger, 21 June 2002