The German elections – a view from below

So – Germany has elected, and the results look grim: a huge shift the right, with large wins for a party, the AfD, parts of which have officially been declared anti-constitutional (but a ban does not seem on the horizon). I spent the first few hours after the polls had closed with a group of volunteer election helpers counting votes. I had registered my availability a few weeks earlier, and had gotten a letter that summoned me to appear at 7.30 on election morning in a middle school in a rather diverse neighborhood of the city in West Germany where I spend part of my life. I cycled through the empty city at dawn, we received instructions, and then we had to agree on shifts and it turned out that I wasn’t needed until 1pm. I cycled home and showed up again later. 

One isn’t supposed to talk about what happens in the voting locale, but two things that struck me are so general that I can share them. The first was the discrepancy between the results – the huge shift to the right – and the happy multiculturalism that the school building in which the elections took place exuded: posters with the different countries the children came from, big “School without racism” signs, a colorful world map, slogans about respectful collaboration, etc. etc. Many school buildings in Germany are like this, and many voters will have seen these things when waiting in line to go to the voting booth. But this is exactly what the AfD rejects, and the conservative party, which had moved to the middle under Merkel, is also riding more and more on the anti-immigration wave…

The other discrepancy was after the voting locale had closed and we got to counting the votes. It’s quite a task, sorting and counting and recounting and sorting in a different way and counting again (because of Germany’s complicated voting system in which both party percentages and votes for MPs play a role). The ballot papers are quite large, and the paper is slick, so you have to be careful like hell not to let two papers stick to each other. There are eight people in the room, and members of the public can observe, everything is counted by at least two people, and for each count, you check whether the numbers add up. For minutes on end, you hear nothing but the shuffling of papers, the soft murmuring of counting voices, and the scratchings of pen on paper when results are written down. It’s a very focussed, diligent, no-nonsense kind of process, with everyone trying hard to avoid mistakes. A general cheer follows if the numbers do add up after a round of counting. In the whole country, thousands of volunteers are involved in this low-tech, high-reliability process – and yet, the outcome is an election result (with very high participation, by the way), that shows that a fifth of the electorate trust a part that wants to have nothing to do with facts, and that aligns itself with Trump’s and Musk’s post-truth strategies. God knows from what internet channels they get their news; the conspiracies about how the elections have been manipulated are already circulating there…

Now a lot depends on which of the smaller parties will make it into parliament, across the threshold of 5%. That will determine what kind of coalitions could achieve majorities. The coming weeks, probably months, will be interesting!