A cyclist passes a European election poster of Bernd Lucke, Chairman of Germany's Eurosceptic party "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) in Hamburg, May 20.FABIAN BIMMER/Reuters
If you were German and were voting in Sunday's European Union elections, who would you choose?
A lot of Germans have no idea, because the poll list is cluttered with some 25 parties. They range from the mainstream centre-left and centre-right standbys to the Pirates (transparency and freedom of information), Alternative for Germany (pro-Europe but anti-euro, confusingly) and a party simply called The Party (linked to the satirical magazine Titanic and, among other follies, devoted to the launch of a "lazy quota" for leading management positions).
For befuddled voters, the ever-helpful Germany government has some advice: Fire up your computer and go to Wahl-O-Mat.
In German, "wahl" means "vote." Launched by the federal agency for civic information in 2002, the site provides a wealth of information on the issues of the day, from immigration to the environment, and provides the reader with a synopsis of each party's position. Aimed at young voters, and blithe voters who tend to ignore politics between elections, it has been used millions of times and has no doubt given more than a few of them a crash course in hands-on democracy.
The fun bit is the Wahl-O-Mat itself, which matches the views of the user with party platforms. It does so by asking you 38 questions tailored to the election being contested. You have the option of answering agree, do not agree or neutral. With a little help from Google Translate, I went through the process.
Here are a few of the questions:
Should Germany retain the euro? (I answered yes)
Should Edward Snowden be offered asylum in an EU country? (yes)
Should a tax be implemented on the trade of financial products? (yes)
Should all banks be nationalized? (no)
Should same-sex marriages be recognized by all EU member states? (yes).
Should euro bonds be launched? (neutral)
You get the idea.
The program spit out the names of five parties that most closely matched my views. They ranged from the big centre-left party, the Social Democrat Party, too the Greens, though I should apparently not rule out Die Linke, the post-Communist party that came out of eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall (no, I am not Communist).
Of course, Wahl-O-Mat is simplistic, so I found it only somewhat useful. The questions are highly selective and may not cover a topic that interests the user. For instance, there was a question on border controls but nothing on the hot-button issue of internal EU migration or Germany's phase-out of nuclear energy, which may result in the greater use of coal. For many of the questions, the three possible answers were impossibly limited. This is not sympathetic to anyone with grey-area views. It also removes the candidate's personality from the equation, though I suppose that might be the point.
Still Wahl-O-Mat should not be dismissed as a mere game. It does engage the user, will guide some of them to a decision and, better yet, probably encourage a small minority of non-voters to drag themselves to the voting booth. For my part, I learned that the party called the Party is rather sympathetic to my views that executive pay should be limited to 25,000 times that of a worker's wages.