A Lengthy Ramble on the Election

Papa and Mama have been excited about the German federal election for weeks now, debating for a long time over pipes and cups of tea in the living room about the issues and which party one can vote for in good conscience, and Ge. has been keeping himself informed in the course of his dutiful and regular readings of the Berliner Zeitung. As for me, I've been cheerfully uninformed — though of course I try to have a good and up-to-date insight into the essential state of the political scene — and was not especially taken with any party, and therefore doubted I think until yesterday whether it was worthwhile to cast a vote at all. My parents were, however, insistent that I shouldn't "be a frog," which is to say a spoil-sport and wet blanket, and that no matter how I vote it's good that I vote at all (even if it's for the FDP). So I did last-minute soul-searching and internet research, and decided to vote for the Green Party.

Once this decision was made I felt completely at ease with it. Normally I'd be a determined SPD voter, but I have felt deeply uneasy about some of the decisions the party leadership has made as part of the government (especially on civil rights and foreign affairs issues), and don't want to risk becoming complicit in anything similar in future. Anyway, it is a wonderful luxury to be able to vote for the Green Party in an electoral system that is not a single-member district plurality electoral system. I have neither automatically cast a vote for the largest right-wing party (the Alliance in Canada and the Republicans in the US), nor is the whole exercise futile because there's only a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing a representative of the Greens in parliament. But I also think that the North American Green Parties tend to be too narrow in focus and at the same time too heterogeneous because they are composed of individuals who each espouse their own, often small-scoped causes, and ignore everyone else's. Besides I have conservative tendencies for instance in that I sympathize a great deal with the American penchant for small government, though I guess that in practice it never really works anyway because it relies too much on the goodwill and good sense of the community.

So this afternoon, Mama, Ge., J., and I went to the nearby school, located the correct voting room, and then presented the letters with which we were invited to the election to one of two men sitting at a table beside the door. Then, after he gave the basic instructions, we waited until one of two booths was free, sat down at the desk behind the cardboard screen, and opened the folded ballot. The ballot paper was grey and therefore presumably recycled (conscientious!); the font size of the ballot was patronizingly large. There was one column of names to the left, which were the candidates for our electoral district; this was the First Choice. To the right there was a much longer column of political parties; this was the Second Choice. I crossed the desired circle for each, then folded the ballot as instructed, and went to a different desk. There I showed my ID card with the letter, was matched up to a list, and then personally inserted the ballot into the box, whose slot a woman was ceremonially covering with a paper.

When we stepped back out of the room a friendly gentleman from the ARD asked us if we would participate in an exit poll, and then gave us each a sheet where we were to indicate our first and second choices, our age range, and our gender (only male and female were options, which is admittedly predictable; the only time I remember seeing "transgender" as an option was for a university residence survey). Then we inserted said sheets into the ARD's more modest box, and went on our merry way. On the way home we stopped to obtain (through Mama's generosity) a material reward for exercising our civic duty: ice cream from the nice gelateria at the Kleistpark intersection. We each had two scoops; the others had cherry, hazelnut, vanilla, espresso, lemon, pear, and chocolate, but I had fig and peach. In any case I don't think it would be a catastrophe if the "Great Coalition" formed again, though the prospect of a CDU-FDP coalition is not at all delightful; but an SPD-Green government would be, given the choices, ideal.