Friday, March 27, 2015

The Age Rule

Up until this week in my local German state of Hessen.....we had this rule in place which had been around for decades.  To be a mayor or city council member.....you had to be between 25 and 71 years old.

The logic?  Well....it's simply the rule....no one can really say if it made sense or not.  Maybe there were some screw-ups with eighty-year-old guys or with twenty-year-old guys as mayors.

A simple piece of legislation passed though.....through the Hessen state government which brings things back to a eighteen-years or older rule for mayor or city council positions within the state.  There's no cut-off now.

Oddly though.....they then inserted another rule into the system which said that you have to pull eight years or more as a mayor or city council guy.....to get some type of government pension deal.  It used to be from day one.....you got something of a pension.

The odds of seeing a eighteen-year-old German run for mayor's office?  You'd have to get vetted by your political party, and I suspect in most large villages (1,000 residents) or a full-up city.....it'd be impossible to talk the political party apparatus into allowing you as a eighteen-year-old to run for such an office.

However, we have so may different parties now....that some of the older and more wiser of folks might look at their dismal chances of winning and just throw everything to the wind, and say that Huns.....the crazy eighteen-year-old kid who parties all the time and acts like John Wayne at local parties.....might get approved by the party apparatus, then find enough young folks in the village who'd vote for the guy as a 'protest-type' vote, then win.

My humble guess is that the Green Party will be the chief party testing younger political candidates.  But I won't guess to the success of the idea.  Who knows.....maybe after a decade....they agree to go back to the old age limit deal because they discovered youth isn't a great thing for the mayor's office.

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