Wahl-O-Mat - or who should you vote for in the German elections?

OK, later this month we will have the German national elections. In Frankfurt and surrounds we also have the Hessen state elections which means the results of the state elections will probably reflect those of the national elections, which sounds none too clever, but anyway .....

OK, this isn't the UK or the US and consequently based upon the first past the post system and consequently you are usually stuck with a choice of either the uninspiring or the downright awful ("awful", not "awesome" NB). Yes, there are other options, but they can never win or have any say in what is happening, so .......

This is Germany, where they have an interesting form of proportional representation. So every vote counts and provided the party that you choose gets at least 5% of the vote, they will be represented in the parliamentary body involved (national or state as the case may be).

The end product is invariably a coalition of some sort, as hardly ever do you get a majority party winning over 50% of the vote. Consider instead the UK where the majority party often gets a landslide with scarcely 40% of the vote, for example.

There are coalitions and coalitions, some work out OK, some don't. It usually prevents absolute extremes winning, and is supposedly representative. The national elections this time, I should add, are for the Lower House (like the House of Representatives in the US), who hold most of the power here. The state elections are important though as not merely do they decide who runs some things locally (like when your kids have school holidays inter alia), but they have a proportional representation in the Upper House of the German Parliament (a bit like the Senate in the US, though less powerful, but a sight more significant than the anachronistic House of Lords in the UK!), where they can veto what comes through the Lower House.

With me so far?

Good.

You are now a German citizen (good!), you have the chance to vote (good!), and you haven't a clue about whom to vote for (where have you been for the last few years, and if you have not been bothered before, why are you now?). OK. To help you decide, an organisation called the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (The German Federal Agency for Civic Education) has come up with an excellent Internet tool call the Wahl-O-Mat. This isn't totally new - I tried it out before the 2009 elections.

What it does.

There are 38 questions. You are asked to choose between "yes", "no" and "neutral".

When you have answered all 38 questions, it then asks you to weight the questions that you regard to be the most important. When you have done that you are asked to choose the political parties and check your combined selection of answers against theirs.

There are ..... 29 parties. Repeat that - there are TWENTY-NINE parties standing in this election. 28 have made their positions known to Wahl-O-Mat - so one of your selections may be unfortunate.

You are given the list of 29 party names and asked to choose 8 to match against your selections. It then becomes very typically scientifically German, whizzes through all the data, and presents you with a list of results. In batting order.

You can then check your positions against each of the 8 parties you have selected to get an idea where they stand. If you want to try it against all 29, then note your answers the first time you go through, and repeat the exercise 4 times, picking different parties at the end.

Most of the 29 are not that significant, but in a true democracy deserve to be heard. So - you can just pick the major parties (as I did) and one or two to make up the numbers and do it once, but if you think someone else might have the answers .....

It is an interesting exercise. For those interested try:

http://www.wahl-o-mat.de/bundestagswahl2013/main_app.php

It's all in German, did I hear from you? Of course it is - these are the German national elections! You may not be able to find a radio station these days that plays mainly music performed in German, but the language has still survived (for now at least) in the political sphere!

A couple of negatives.

1. I have the problem in thinking that there are issues you cannot answer with a straight (yes/no/neutral) answer. Ask a question like "what do you intend to do to bring unemployment down?", for example. A very important issue, and obviously a straight one word answer is not possible.

2. Infuriatingly, some of the parties that have bothered to give their positions to Wahl-O-Mat do not seem to have positions on some very important issues. This does not seem to affect their score as negatively as it ought to!

So you still need to think about some issues that are not dealt with here. It is a good taster, a good starting-point, but you have to go beyond that. Wahl-O-Mat does actually finish by asking you a number of questions as to whether your interest in politics has risen as a result, whether it has affected your voting plans etc. And whether you will look into things further.

I found it interesting though. As for my personal take, there will follow an article called "Wahl-O-Mat - or who should I vote for in the German elections?" (not that I can) in the next couple of days.