Voters are mysterious creatures, and not just in Saxony-Anhalt. As individuals they are completely irrelevant, but as a group they are considered to be of crucial importance. Because in large numbers they decide elections. In Saxony-Anhalt it even seems as if they are deciding the future of democracy in Germany. But only if two or three percent of them decide in one direction or the other. But in the end, it's possible that nobody wants to rule in Magdeburg; some because they could only do it with coalition partners who rejected them; the others because they themselves reject coalitions.
So the voters as a group decide, and they don't decide. They are not a group at all, just a bunch. They have little in common with each other. Or even more clearly: sometimes something connects them, sometimes almost nothing. You can create subsets from them. Then they vote either as workers or as East Germans, young people, women, academics, former SPD voters. This is how they are presented by the election broadcasts. On the one hand, this suggests that young female academics from East Germany are not such an important subset. On the other hand, it suggests that a skilled worker at Daimler-Benz has more in common with a construction worker than he does with a waitress or a postman.
In the voting booth, voters are individuals. A certain age and nationality are sufficient for admission. Nobody can ask them to give personal or supra-personal reasons why they made their mark. Accordingly, speculations are rampant as to what the reasons are. For example, it is said that they vote according to their interests. But the workers recently ran away from the SPD, not to join the Left, but rather the AfD, which is still unclear as to whether it intends to do something for the lower income groups. Entire books have been written about the alleged protest against East Coast elites being articulated in the election of Donald Trump.
The fact that the representatives who are elected are not bound to orders is stated in the Basic Law. So they are not representatives of interests, whatever they promise in the election campaigns. At least since Friedrich Merz's spectacular breach of word regarding sticking to the debt brake, no interested voter is likely to believe that voting is a barter transaction between honest merchants.
If you seriously think about what your interests are, this concept will disappear anyway. The wishes are mixed up; as the wishes of employees, they are not congruent with the wishes of consumers, parents, train drivers, taxpayers, sick people and rural residents. We live in all of these roles, and disposable income plays a role for all of these interests, but there is no party that only goes into the election campaign with a beer mat that says three or four tax rates.
The confusion of political wishes cannot be aggregated, whatever the Wahl-O-Mat promises. This opens up the choice to other motives. They can be seen, for example, from talk shows, in which political personnel perform very differently. Who they find impossible, who is just bearable or even trustworthy varies greatly among viewers. Often the following applies: the longer you listen to the sayings, regardless of your political orientation, the stronger your nerves you need to get yourself up to vote. The assumption that these are just figures of speech anyway helps. After the election, you'll need these nerves anyway because disappointments are to be expected on all sides. âWe would like to, but unfortunately the election results don't allow itâ is the reliably expected formula of those who emerge as election winners.
However, it is not just the voters who are mysterious, but the elections themselves. For weeks now, the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt have appeared to be dominated by issues that are either of concern to only a few voters - Bauhaus, homeschooling, care of war graves - or are not politically accessible at all or only extremely indirectly accessible from Magdeburg: immigration laws, Russia policy, pensions, EU membership. The two ministerial positions that the AfD has promised to eliminate could be the foreign and defense ministers of Saxony-Anhalt.
At the same time, voters can go to the polls feeling that their decision has national importance. Whatever the outcome, it will not be read as a regional event, but as an indicator of a trend across society. The feeling of being connected to the bigger picture, which is often only inflated by politicians and other âelitesâ, is now also shared with voters between Wittenberge and Zeitz.
