Well I can now actually vote - but for whom?

I got a very large envelope yesterday.

It was about the upcoming elections for whoever should serve on Frankfurt City Council (apparently as an EU national I am allowed to vote - my non-EU wife cannot!). OK, there are some complications. I apparently get 93 votes. How to work out how that works is fascinating enough. Choose one party and all its candidates, and it is quite simple. Anything else .... Yes, well.

Problem then follows who to vote for. Will anyone achieve any worthwhile objectives? Are they up to the job? Would you want to support these people?

Well at least there is not the problem that you have in the US and used to have in the UK where the choice is between a party who would never represent your interests on the one hand, and one that would try and fail on the other (though in the UK, the line between the two has become extremely blurred - Blair turned the Labour Party into a Tory Party clone, so the choice is between two parties that would never represent my interests!).

In Germany though the choice is so vast, it is overwhelming. And when you come down to the (five!) main parties, the choice is not that inspiring.
Start with the CDU. The traditional German conservative party, traditional conservative rather than American neo-conservative, the party of Adenauer and Erhard .... In the days of the economic miracle they were well worth supporting. That the majority of their support have already passed retirement age, probably says everything. Merkel may be better than Kohl, but that is not that much in her favour. She is certainly no Adenauer! The party has no fresh ideas, and gets away with being a safe pair of hands. At local level, they hardly inspire.
The FDP - their national tax policy (give away tax cuts without having any cash in the till) is total nonsense. At local level, are they any better? About the last choice I would make all things given. Neo-liberalism strikes me as being just about the complete reverse of what is needed at any time - it is the total reverse of sound money thinking. They are on a completely different page.
The SDP. According to a test I took before the last election, this is the party that I should support. More of their policies suit me than any other (I should in theory be a good Social Democrat). Your mind then goes back to the 8 years of incompetence when in power nationally between 1998 and 2006. Schröder's only achievement was to keep Germany out of the Iraq War. On a local level they might do better, but the concepts "incompetence" and "SDP" seem to fit together like a glove.
The Green party (Die Grünen) are still relatively radical, and have some interesting ideas. Probably where I will end up again, even if the vote for them tends to reflect dissatisfaction with current trends rather than whether the environmentalist philosophy can be made to work in practical terms while maintaining prosperity for everyone.
Die Linke (the "Left" party) - well I don't like the version of capitalism which hit the wall in 2008 either. I also don't like the thought of people sitting in gun turrets, built along barbed wire fences, ensuring that nobody gets out, and while their national commitment to cut unemployment and poverty sound good on paper, the realisation that the parent of this party is the former East German Communist regime .... Yes. Fence Frankfurt off, train a large number of border guards, make sure nobody gets out! And there is also the realisation that you have to create wealth in order to share it - sharing out a static pile reduces the pile and does not rebuild it, so everyone eventually gets poorer. I don't think that they have the answer.
For the rest, the Pirate Party are a load of Julian Assange clones with a lot of FDP economic ideas - no thanks.
The Gray Panthers - fighting for pensioners' rights is a great idea, but how effective will they be with overall policy?
The KPD - the non East German Communist Party. Typically they do not get on with their natural sister party die Linke, while sharing most of their unworkable policies.
Freie Wähler (Free voters) - independence may be a fine thing. Can independents get anything done?
NPD, Republikaner and the other neo-fascist extreme nationalist trash? Absolutely no way, thank you!

I am not hopeful that much good will come of this. I believe in democracy, I just do not seem to believe in any of the politicians that it throws up. But I will turn up and vote now I have the opportunity, though scepticism will guide me more than hope.