Germany’s no-emotion voting guide surges despite campaign of personalities
politico.eu
politico.eu
Wahlomat is really great for 2 things though: First there are a lot of small parties, and while some of them probably deserve a seat at the table, it would be too much work to read all their programs. Wahlomat gives me the ability to presort some of the smaller parties, read their answers, and then maybe dig into their programs if I found that interesting.
The other thing is that Wahlomat is a great discussion starter. A few friends and I first did it all by ourselves, then went through our answers together. My opinion was shifted on a couple of these questions, shifting my overall position a bit, too.
After you get your result, you can see the reasons why every party gave the answers they did, and reading those statements, especially on answer where your party of choice had different answers than your own were very insightful. I somehow doubt that too many people will put that much effort into it, though.
One question where this really stuck out to me was on a speed limit on all highways. One party that I am interested in gave the same answer I did, but their reasoning was superficial and shortsighted. Another small party gave the opposite answer but gave a fairly nuanced and convincing explanation on why they think a policy like that is incomplete.
Comparing the two, the former just sounded like political pandering and I very much hope enough people see through this and don't just give their votes to the top score.
Given the alternatives: Vote by personality vs vote by Wahl-o-mat score, I would 100% of the time encourage people to vote by Wahl-o-mat score.
For example, if I was elected saying the tax on beer should be lower, but having met with health experts I've changed my mind and think it should be higher.
Of course, a cynic would say that's just an excuse for delaying, and a trick to play both sides...
But your neighbour might see me as a liar, who promised one thing then did the opposite.
And your other neighbour might see me as part of a ruling elite that hears a clear statement of will from the people, then ignores it and does the opposite.
This is a very common type of question in it and it fills me with immense frustration when using the tool.
The one redemption it has though, is that it allow parties to explain their reasoning when giving an answer. That makes a more detailed study of the issues easier.
So I generally still spent a while filling it in and studying the answers. (And then go vote the same way I always do... I find that I rarely care about the current political talking points and much more about the unexpected things that will come up in the coming years. For that you need someone that is trustworthy and has a similar ideology, not a party program.)
Many young people were upset when upload filters were introduced after the politicians responsible had explicitly and publicly promised that there wouldn't be any.
Many old people were upset by the amount of corruption happening recently, from overpriced covid masks to 700 mio Eur in non-refundable deposit payments for a software project which was ultimately scrapped before it ever started.
And then there's the aspect that parties which have been in power for a long time and reduced support and subsidies for solar and wind energy are listed as caring about the climate.
That's because this table purely summarizes what parties have said they plan to do. But there is no reality check.
I beg your pardon, upload filters?
But as a voter who is in favour of a higher CO2 tax, why would you care about that distinction? If there's one party who thinks climate change doesn't exist and one who believes in climate change but is unwilling to do anything about it, the only difference between the parties is in their rhetoric. I'd argue that voting based on actual policy proposals a benefit, not a drawback of this approach.
That's obviously not the distinction between the parties here. The second one intends (or at least has a policy to) do something about it, but just not by raising the existing CO2 tax. Maybe instead they intend to raise the top rate of income tax and increase subsidies for public transport.
If you incorporated all of the parties policies into the Wahl-O-Mat, that would all come out in the wash and you'd end up with your preferred party, but also you might abandon the process because it's taking too long.
The challenge is to distil the parties' policies into a reasonable subset that accurately captures the differences between them, some kind of principal component analysis.
Do they, though? I don't know how familiar you are with the German political parties, but the concern about climate change is mostly empty marketing on all sides. We should stop running coal electricity plants, but somehow turning off all nuclear plants immediately is more important. We should stop subsidising driving to work, but that would be regressive etc. Most parties are making noises about climate change being bad, but they're all pretty unwilling to accept any trade-offs involved in doing something about it.
I'm saying if you want something effective do be done, look at what the parties are actually proposing to do, not how concerned they're expressing to be in their election flyers.
So you should give the party in favour of increasing income tax and subsidizing public transport a chance to say that, because it's a hard choice, just a different hard one than increasing the carbon tax.
Similar, it would be nice if any party would have a date when subsidizes to fossil fuel based power plants will end. There is unlikely that any party is in favor of having those subsidizes, but it seems equally unlikely that anyone is ready yet to be the ones to remove them and face the trade-offs of not paying those plants to keep the engines warm and ready.
You cannot find a party that you agree with 100%. If you have to choose the lesser evil, you may still want to check why exactly a party disagrees with you.
But of course this system gets abused, because electors don’t know who they can trust.
As David Mayhew has shown, legislative bodies, regardless of country and system, all end up doing kind of the same thing, over the long haul.
The Imprint of Congress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=394KcetPJHY
That seems about right to me.
Over time, I increasingly consider policy work and parliamentary work as separate jobs. (Campaigning and governing are yet other distinct jobs.)
Policy work is the discussion, lobbying, discourse, rhetoric, etc. Culture and consensus. Whatever that is.
Parliamentary work is the knife fight around the implementation. Winners and losers, struggle for power, who gets how much cake and ice cream.
I do agree that it is really a nice conversation starter and can help people who are not sure between one or another.
The structural problem (or feature) in Germany is that voting for a party who is not expected to pass 5% in total votes is basically the same as not voting at all. For me as a holder of niche opinions, this is inconvenient. Of course, everybody knows this feature exists to prevent the recurrence of a Weimar Republic-style desaster.
I do wish we (Western-style democracies in general) would make more use of direct democratic measures. Barring that, I would absolutely love to give my mandate to several parties in different areas (for example, give my mandate to the Pirate Party on IP matters, but give it to someone else on social policy).
A successful single-issue party that has ill-defined goals in other areas is a ripe target for people pushing other single-issue agendas to insinuate those into the party programme.
In my view this caused the death of the German Pirate Party - the initial impression of "generally centrist, but competent and uncompromising on tachnology/IP/privacy" among the electorate was quickly shifted to "wokesters and economic leftists who are way more extreme than even the Left Party" because the initial members were infiltrated and supplanted by leftist political activists...
In general I find the current election campaigns and media coverage rather intellectually offending. I guess it hard to blame the wahlomat for choice topics, that appear throughout the party programs.
One fun fact is that according to a recent study by an economic think tank none of the major party programs if implemented would be enough to reach the Paris climate goals. I highly doubt if any combination or even worse compromise would.
Ya. Platforms are just one facet of the full package.
I've participated in politics in the USA. One fascinating part is the endorsement process. My local party is one of remaining orgs that does rigorous endorsements. Fewer orgs do it over time, tracking with the decline of local (political) news and rise in campaign spending (drowning out all other signals).
Some other tenacious orgs still doing endorsement processes are League of Women Voters, Urban League, Municipal League, League of Conservation Voters, NARAL, most unions, Chambers of Commerce, etc. Every org does their own thing; so this inside baseball game is a whole 'nother world of politics.
It's a lot of work, for all involved.
Candidates seeking our endorsement fill out surveys. This is above and beyond their public platform (position) statements. Some of our questions are deal breakers, where candidates have to abide by our bylaws and positions, by design.
Candidates are rarely blank slates. We also research their past voting, activities, where they get their funding, and so forth.
Then we do endorsement interviews. Every one gets the same prepared, canned questions (for fairness).
Every single election cycle, at least one of our interviews makes the local news. So it's clearly impactful.
During our deliberations, we also consider candidate's campaigns and reputations. We have a heavy bias towards people who play ball, gets things done, are effective. In other words, we're not much interested in someone who agrees with us 100%, but is unlikely to attain our policy goals.
Either it would kill babies or it wasn't going far enough and our chance of iterating improvements to our system were squashed, just like that.
However, for opposition parties this doesn't work reliably since they'll sometimes vote against something if it doesn't go far enough or if they disagree with the implementation details, even if they agree with the general idea. Unless you read up on the vote, these nuances will be missed.
It also reinforces the status quo since parties that aren't in parliament yet would not be covered.
"We support clean energy" - "we had to support opening new coal plants because we wanted to get support on our budget proposal for some agency"... Do I really give a shit they claim to support clean energy ?
It's a choice to vote against what a party claims to be their values in order to maintain stability in the coalition. The smaller party could also take a chance knowing the larger party won't abandon their comfy government position over it.
It's also interesting to figure out which values or plans a party has been willing to compromise on, since none of them publicly state this before elections.
I feel like these tools work best if you just use them as an additional data point in your decision.
And building a "coalition" isn't a natural law nor even how things were intended – the house is named "parliament" so there shall be discussion of all voting members prior voting on EVERY SINGLE bill. That's the MPs job description.
A coalition in fact is an illegal voting cartel as since decades each contains the paragraph "there will be no differing votes" while each vote is subject only to the conscience of the MP by definition of the constitution.
How could that go together.
Or if they really just bring their core issues through, they seem to be surveillance and not social issues.
If you make a coalition government with the conservatives and you take their program as the coalition program, you did a bad job in forming the coalition.
I like your reasoning. In the end (within reason) I do not care how the laws are implemented, I am voting for the party, which matches what I would like to implement.
I truly believe that the outbreak of socialism within the first four years is baseless fear-mongering.
Your description is spot on, although we tried to exclude votes where something did not "go far enough" for some parties.
AMA.
Have you considered adding references to relevant sections of the party programs on the detailed thesis view?
For example, it might be interesting to see on [1] that the SPD claims to be in favour of the bill they just voted against. This is just one example, but I think an easy way to compare a vote with future claims of the parties would be interesting.
- Is it useful to soberly look at an analysis of a few chosen questions and topics instead of looking at the fuller picture, like for example scandals the parties are involved in? How would a tool look like that includes both?
- The implicit stances of the parties do not seem to really come out. The questions seem to not be designed for that purpose. Is this a limitation of the questions asked, a limitation of the format or are there other limiting factors?
DeinWal is only one tool and it explicitly excludes stuff like scandals and looks and promises. You don't have to vote according to the result of DeinWal, but you can use it as an additional signal.
> The implicit stances of the parties do not seem to really come out. The questions seem to not be designed for that purpose. Is this a limitation of the questions asked, a limitation of the format or are there other limiting factors?
I disagree. I think the results really reflect the stances of the parties. People on social media who post their results seem to agree with their results no matter whether they are right or left. But yes, we are limited to the actual votes of the Bundestag and that means that we can not have a question about e.g. education.
Wouldn't have thought though I had the most in common with AfD and Green Party. Which is no problem, because I roll the dice for my vote since about 30 years. And neither of them did get my vote. In political and some other questions I am a supporter of a moderate Rhinehart process.
>AMA
When the voter is presented with these vote/policy questions, are they ranked in any way, for example, is a climate question 'more valuable' than the autobahn speed.
How is the order of the yes/no/neutral questions decided, for example from serious to less serious? Who decides?
Who has final say on the question wording?
The DeinWal-Team (Martin, Sophie and I) decided the selection, wording and ordering of the questions. We tried to be as neutral and fair as possible. We tried to use only votes where the outcome does not contradict some party values (e.g. because a party thinks a vote "does not go far enough").
One thing I like especially is how I can use deinwal.de to evaluate specific representatives for my direct vote.
It is really encouraging to hear how many people enjoyed the tool.
As an opposition party you can basically vote what you like, you don't have to consider the consequences (because you often know it won't pass) and you don't have to compromise with a coalition partner.
Having said that: I'm generally not a fan of these tools, precisely because of those issues. Wahl-o-mat has the issue raised by the original poster, i.e. they look at what people announce, not what they do, but the alternative isn't much better, as it's comparing apples and oranges.
In multi part parliametary systems, parties will form governments and small party A has to be prepared to vote against their program or election promise, because that's the concession they had to make to rule in coalition with party B.
Basically all the programs and promises has the form "if we get a majority ourselves and the budget allows then..." but that effectivley never happens. So it's all ambition. Some things can be expressed as promises e.g."we'll never allow X to happen or rule in coalition with Y, we'd rather topple the government and call new elections if that was on the table". If parties fail to live up to that, there is (rightfully) a discussion about broken promises. But otherwise, I think it's rare to see parties say one thing and vote another.
Historically it’s more likely than not that promises are kept. (That this isn’t the case is mostly dumb propaganda.) The biggest wrinkle to this is that Germany has coalition governments, so no one party can implement their whole election program.
What is and isn’t done isn’t random, though, and you will find different parties putting a different emphasis one different things. For example, I’m certain that the Greens would drop a great many of their policies on anything except climate if they were elected. However, it’s not as though that emphasis is exactly surprising.
Other than that Wahl-o-Mat is an obviously imperfect tool trying to somewhat simplify something very complex. Which is valuable.
I have this simple strategy. I base my decision for who to not vote for based on the behavior of the parties and my decision for who to vote for based on their political program. It's not very surprising that the results were the same.
We lost the capability to make and accept compromises.
The only one thing, that is truly additional relevant indicator: Are the parties/parliamentarian transparent and free of corruption/lobbyism.
These tools are rather handy for extracting actual opinions from candidates though, which they usually are pretty successful in hiding among all the PR-esque claptrap that they spew out in speech and writing.
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-germany-dortmund-may15th20...
PS: Remember to say NO to an Autobahn speed limit of 130 km/h! 131 km/h is the way to go!
To be fair, though, in this election, climate change and COVID raised that interest pretty much on their own.
Not AfD by the way, but "Der Dritte Weg", a party that I learned about through the Wahl-O-Mat.
[1] https://www.welt.de/regionales/nrw/article163830133/Hier-koe... [2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/landgericht-verbietet-e...
Anyway, a Red-Red-Green result would be just as much an insult as some posters. I wish I had money on the SPD, their resurgence seems to have come out nowhere. I was expecting a big rise in Green numbers after the terrible flooding earlier in the year...
I also wonder if parties like The Third Way or the far-left ones aren't partially ops to split the vote on the ends of the spectrum.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiwirtschaft#Weitere_Vertret...
>Aktion Dritter Weg/Liberalsoziale innerhalb der Partei Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, vertritt freiwirtschaftliche Ideen und veröffentlicht sie in der Zeitschrift Alternativen (siehe Georg Otto)
Freiwirtschaft is probably the most neutral/centrist "third way" possible. It's neither leaning toward either capitalism nor communism. Rather, the goal is a natural economic order.
I wasn't familiar with Gesell and the ideas Freiwirtschaft. It actually sounds like a decent (real) third way, a lot like Georgism, and an idea worthy of debating at least.
E.g. the question "All of the labour force must be covered by the state pension" sounds great but glosses over the whole problem of provisioning that money for future generations (Germany's worker/pensioner ratio is supposed to sink to 1.7 in 2050) and certainly doesn't cover potential alternatives like an Australian Superannutation style system.
Democracy only works when we're humble and aware of our own limitations. We need to develop our trust in other people based on their capability as opposed to their personality.
The whole article is just slamming an attempt at improving the situation without suggesting any improvements. It's the typical "Hah! Look! They tried! Idiots!".
Do you think you're going to be able to convince the bricklayer, that just came back home after 8 hours of work and 2 total hours in traffic, to spend several hours reading up on a party's + candidate's history, political stance, ideology, scandals, in-depth interviews, program, and so on an so forth for every party available?
We should be happy that these things at least exist and try to aid people when making these decisions, instead of belittling them (the tools and their makers) and calling the whole thing futile. At least there are attempts to counter (at least a little bit) the deluge of opinions, misquotes, misinformation, faux news, deception and lies, that are spread, facilitated and guided on and by social networks.
Like "we should stop burning coal" - obviously we should, as fast as possible. But stopping tomorrow won't work, neither will treating every part of the country the same way. Is this the most urgent measure we can do for climate?
You just can't answer these questions without extensive research or following the usual news cycle. It comes back to clicking the answers you heard from your favorite party, around the sensational issues they're always discussing.
If you check the detail answers from parties on Wahl-O-Mat, you can often see this:
Party A: "We agree, but only if x"
Party B: "We disagree, because we want Y, which is similar"
And both actually want the same, but with a simple "yes/no" answer, this isn't accurately reflected.
The questions are often dumbed down and you actually do need a lot of background information. With many questions, my answer is "it depends" or "I don't know enough".
Wahl-O-Mat isn't there to simply tell who you have to vote. It should make you think, maybe reevaluate your priorities and views but in the end, it's a list of questions where you can compare all parties answers. You just have to ignore the percentage match.
We must also remember that while the tools obviously won't be the end of the story, they are still helpful. It might mean that I just have to read the party programs and watch interviews with a handful of parties instead of 10 of them.
It should be compared to other alternatives of the same effort (voting the same as your parents, going with a gut feeling, ...).
Actually, you can just skip the answer. But this is a big fail (or intentional?) of Wahl-o-mat, because the interface is focused on letting the people choose, while hiding the skip-option in plain sight. A similar problem is that they have no explanation given to each question.
I can only assume this is on purpose to let the people answer honestly, even if they just randomly use their gut-feeling.
On the other side, political parties are a bit what you demand, just on a more abstract level. At least in Germany, we choose them for their specific answers to our questions (or should do it that way), and then hope that they implement them. Though, in reality, politic is complicated and full of compromising and accepting reality. So it's not always possible or good to actually do what the crowd demands.
While it's true that most countries should use more democratic power from their citizen, the unsolved problem is how that can be implemented in a good way which would not harm the country long term. See Brexit for a case where this completely backfired. Or the ending of atomic power in Germany, which now backfires because the country can't stop coal mining.
The main reasons: First, direct democracy is very vulnerable to populism. Easy slogans that prey on emotions are prone to win against more realistic attitudes. Second, it's very easy to manipulate direct voting. The way you ask can practically determine the outcome. We know that from opinion polls where seemingly very similar questions can lead to totally different results, based on small details or how many choices there are. There are many ways to prevent this in opinion polls, but these would not work in an adversarial political setting. Third, many decisions require expertise that cannot be put into simple questions, and the general public will not have the expertise. In Germany, many members of parliament are surprisingly well qualified in certain areas like tax and defence politics. These are the "backseat" members voted in by party lists, not by direct election. Giving a direction and letting these experts figure out the details later works better than asking for concrete decisions that cannot be later corrected (because they are, as you say, legally binding). If you let people decide about the same issues directly, they will most often not even be able to distinguish between suggestions that are feasible and those that are imaginary. Again, the populist who provides the easy, though entirely imaginary "solution" can easily gain the upper hand. Direct democracy is also more vulnerable to disinformation than representative democracy. This also happens in party programs, of course, but the representative power structure kind of dampens the negative effects from it. Finally, representatives are ideally able to take on political responsibility (and sometimes indeed do), i.e., resign from their post even if a mistake wasn't their personal fault. No corresponding concept of political responsibility exists for the suggested technocrats. Moreover, once a policy decision is made, putting it into place requires a long series of more or less political decisions, too. You cannot just hand over those smaller political decisions to experts.
My 2 cents. Of course, this doesn't preclude discussing how much direct democracy one needs or wants. But I personally completely reject any suggestions for radical direct democracy (which every new radical party invariably makes for a while).
I vote green/left, although they tax me higher, because I think climate change and social justice is more important than whether or not I have 1k per year more or less.
Cue Jeff Bezos getting a tax refund.
Having to consider every minor political issue would be the opposite of what I want.
I agree that maybe some middle ground could be better, though. The parties are too coarse grained, there is no party I agree with on all points. I suppose others feel the same.
From my very limited perception, Stemwijzer and Kieskompas in NL are quite popular (for the young-ish, progressive and tech-inclined generation), more so than similar alternatives in Italy. On the other hand, it seems that in NL there's more openness to vote for a different party at every election - while in Italy the electorate seems more polarized and rigid (in Italy the electoral system is not fully proportional, this has surely a great impact in this). I wonder if the usage of these apps reflects these dynamics .
When I hear about such initiatives I am always wary of this kind of polling manipulation:
1: There should be a general speed limit on all Autobahn roads.
2: Germany should increase its defense budget.
3: Young adults at the age of 16 should be allowed to vote in federal elections. [current age is 18]
4: Subsidies for wind power turbines should be stopped.
5: Stronger legal limitations for the abilities of landlords to raise the rents.
6: Covid-19 vaccines should stay protected by patents.
7: The planned end date of 2038 for coal power plants should be moved to an earlier date.
8: All working people should have to join the federal pension funds.
9: The right for recognized refugees to have their families following them should be removed.
10: There should be a national tax for revenue resulting from digital services.
11: The traditional family consisting of a farther, mother and children should be stronger supported than other forms of families.
12: Donations from companies to parties should be continued to be allowed.
13: Students should get financial support independant of the income of their parents.
14: It should be generally allowed to have a second nationality besides the German one.
15: Federal administrations should be gender-neutral in all published writings.
16: The North-Stream-2 pipeline transporting gas from Russia to Germany should put into use as planned.
17: The solidaric tax should be completely abolished.
18: It should be generally allowed to wear a head scarf for all federal employees during their duty.
19: Buying of new cars with combustion engines should be allowed into the far future.
20: The federal government should have more authority about school politics.
21: The federal government should support more projects to fight antisemitism.
22: Chinese companies should not get contracts for expanding the communication infrastructure in Germany.
23: The state should continue to collect taxes for religious organizations.
24: The controlled sale of Cannabis should be allowed generally.
25: Germany should exit the EU.
26: The candidate lists of the parties should be equally filled with women and men.
27: Hospitals should continue to be paid a fixed fee per case.
28: There should be a tax for large properties.
29: It should be allowed to use face recognition software on video surveillance feeds of public places.
30: Married couples without children should continue to get tax exceptions [like those with children]
31: Biological agriculture should be getting stronger support than conventional.
32: Islamic organizations should be recognized as religious organizations by the federal state.
33: The taxes on CO2 for heating and driving should raise quicker than planned.
34: The constitutional limit on public debt should be unchanged.
35: Asylum should be continued to be granted only for political prosecuted.
36: The minimum wage should be raised to 12€ in 2022.
37: There should be higher taxes on air travel.
38: Companies should decide on their own whether they want to allow home office.
Some where quite difficult to translate to keep the tone, and a lot might require some more background to understand. I have tried my best to be faithful, overall I would say they are phrased very neutral, though with a lot of statements it is immediately obvious, from which party line they would come from.
Now... more than a couple of these questions can be given the same answers from completely different perspectives. For example:
> 34: The constitutional limit on public debt should be unchanged
You can agree because you think the limit should be increased, decreased, abolished, or set to 0.
> 36: The minimum wage should be raised to 12€ in 2022.
You may disagree because you think it should be raised more; or raised less; or lowered. Or raised to the same amount, but this year.
> 25: Germany should exit the EU.
You may agree because you think Germany should split up into independent regional states; or because you feel the EU is an anti-democratic mechanism; etc.
Realistically, all promises are at best "we will try to".
Very interesting, seems to be the opposite of what’s happening in the US.
"Should we provide more services for XXX?"
"Should we invest more in XXX?"
"Should we pay for all student costs for XXX?"
Is a really common refrain on these questionnaires, and the problem is, we all have an instinct towards 'wanting more stuff' even for the benefit of others.
The entire issue revolves around 'how to pay for' and 'the cost / efficiently' of such things - not whether or not we want them.
Who doesn't want free stuff?
I watched a young woman in Instagram take the Canadian test and her 'political views' boil down to 'all the stuff should be free, we should invest unlimited amounts in the environment, and we should have UBI that's higher than current minimum wage'.
I don't think this is a 'political view' rather, it's a undeveloped opinion based on the 'easy first order instinct' of wanting free stuff because that's what the question was asking.
If they paired every question the cost, such as:
"Free tuition for students, will be paid for by increasing average working years by 4 years, or taxes by 3% over entire working life"
"UBI policy, which will be paid for by 10% tax in increase on all citizens and/or increasing retirement age by 5 years"
"$10/day subsidized child care, paid for by 5% tax increase"
There are also innumerable issues that will be hard to fathom for the general population, like National Defence Procurement, Pension system etc..
I think we should be very careful about how we create these policy guides, they need more thought.
The one thing I will say about Germans is however, they have the 'cost' instinct, without fail it seems as though every political survey shows the 'cost' of something or the other being a primary concern or consideration. I never see that in Canada.
Perhaps we should make it normative that every political program announcement has to be accompanied by the cost estimation and payment mechanism.
etc..
It is a very left wing institution, unfortunately. So it is only "widely trusted" in the sense that the majority of people still seems to be left-leaning.
I'm not a huge fan of the Wahl-O-Mat, because I feel the way the questions are phrased is often misleading or too simplified. Maybe it is better than nothing, though.
Let's say there's a right-wing party wanting to deport all foreigners. But they want a tempo limit, want to invest in wind energy, etc... In the end you could end up with a lot of (false!) agreement.
In the UK, up until recently we had a pretty far left guy called Jeremy Corbyn in charge of Labour, the largest left wing party. I was pretty aligned with him on a his ideas but I thought he was completely ineffective as a political leader, and that he would never have gained the capital to get his own policies through. I was glad to see him gone.
This is not really comparable to the largely antagonistic two party system of the UK (or the US) where conflict between individuals and leader figures feature so heavily.
It's the same in the UK and in both cases the party leader is in charge.
One key difference is that the UK's political landscape is bi-partite so coalitions are usually not needed.
The voting system in the UK is also designed to produce a clear majority in Parliament in order to allow for a stable and effective government (by 'effective' I am able to implement its policies, i.e. to legislate).
For your actual decision, a lot of other aspects should play a role. In general, the party should have more weight than the individual candidate, but only so much. And especially, in Germany the government will consist of a coalition of at least 2 parties, probably 3 this year. While I do think that on the first order of approximation you should elect the party which represents you best, sometimes strategic considerations can play a role too.
After usage of it, it becomes apparent as to why it gets zero coverage: Almost everyone I've asked (migrant/unemployed/self-employed/postal-worker/cooks/farmer/cab-driver/...) experienced a stark surprise.
The parties they came out with, did not match at all with what is presented to them as a "good choice" by the media.
Some of my migrant friends joked that I should label them a right-winger now.
I'm not sure whether they will base their election on the Wahl-O-Mat experience alone. But it does show a huge difference in the agenda-setting of our media vs. the needs of individuals.
I don't see how that's odd. Many migrants come from more conservative (in the Western sense) cultures. They can align with the progressive parties because they're afraid of the conservative ones due to their anti-immigrant stances, but that doesn't mean they are progressive.
Yeah, I used to point out that Islam as practiced by a significant number of Muslims is further to the right than Trump supporters.
You do get downvoted for pointing that out,though.
Also, don't forget to actually activate all parties. Selecting 5 right wing parties and then being surprised that you don't vote for them is stupid.
Did they get something like AFD or NPD as top-choices?
My wife, originating out of Vietnam has studied in germany, has now full citizenship and is working here would rather vote for the AfD then anything left of the CDU. Why? Because the memory of $left_leaning_party = communism = bad living circumstances are too deep engrainend in her mind.