(From an American prospective)
1. The multi-party situation. In a normal national election, there are a minimum of twenty-five parties which run....of which....in 2017, seven met the 5-percent rule (meaning they get seats in the Bundestag).
The other 1.2-million-odd voters and their parties? Nothing.
The biggest non-player? Freie Wahler, with 589k votes across Germany in 2017.
With the various parties....you can sit down and write your ten big 'pocket' items, and gauge which one is more dedicated to that topic. A fair number of young Germans have gone to this type of voting.....instead of being an iron-clad supporter of X-party for forty-odd years.
2. The national election is geared to every four years, unless the coalition fails. The state elections? Every five years, unless the coalition fails. Local or city elections? Every five years.
3. Coalition failures? It's rare....because they all sit down and write an agreement....we vote this way on these topics, and the members of the party 'swear' by this document. Coalition failure typically occurs over scandals, or some massive new topic which wasn't on the original agreement.
4. Affect by social media? Twitter and Facebook has minimal effect (at least currently). Germans with a Facebook account.....47-million (more or less). Germans with a Twitter account....5.8-million (Jan 2021 numbers).
If you gaze around (subways, buses, etc).....the bulk are WhatsApp users, and it's direct chatter....having little to nothing to do about politics or canceling people.
The most famous German YouTuber on politics? Rezo, who has around 1.7-million Germans who follow his commentary. My description.....he blasts away on two-star political objectives of the major parties. A lot of younger voters follow this guy and he probably controls 1 to 2 million votes in the final weeks of the election. He had a direct impact in the 2019 EU election in Germany.
5. Environmentalism having a major impact in politics? Yes and no. Every party has a platform for it...some more intensive than others.
The Hamburg harbor idea of dredging it....to allow super-freighters to enter? It was deemed a 'evil' thing and draw negative criticism. However, if you don't do it....the super-freighters move onto a another port, and you lose business, and jobs. People are sensitive to the jobs business now.
6. Political agendas under continual change. If you took a 70-year old German and asked over his views of the CDU....it's not a conservative party any longer. Merkel would probably agree....saying she moved it to 'center-center'. The SPD Party used to be a working-man's party? Most would argue today that they don't readily meet that 1980s version of the party. Even the Greens are regarded as 'changed' because they've moved closer to the center, instead of the far-left.
7. Public TV (ARD/ZDF) have a massive amount of influence over elections (Ha). This was true up through the 1990s. Over the past twenty years....fewer Germans watch the public TV products or listen to the influence.
The threat by the CDU with a white-paper suggesting merging ARD/ZDF? It's taken more as a threat than anything else.
What ZDF and ARD can do....with direct interviews of the various parties and their leadership.....demonstrate incompetent politicians with no basis for the job required.
8. Corruption via the system? No one will argue over this.....various lobbyists are attached to certain parties....to ensure regulations go their way.
9. Influence by Russia in German politics? Over the past decade, you can see several small indicators that efforts are being made. Some urbanized areas probably see more of this....than rural areas.
10. Finally, if you review polling over the past forty years....the polling experts rarely miss by more than a point or two. The type of problems that have existed in the US over polling....have been avoided here for the most part.
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