Nobody to Vote For
Peer Steinbrück looks exhausted. Sixty-six years old, former finance minister, now standing in front of a pale blue backdrop in a black suit and striped tie, trying to land shots on Angela Merkel—Germany’s so-called Teflon Chancellor, coated against all attack. Sweat on his forehead. He can’t quite decide whether to smile or hold a serious expression: smiling might read as hollow, serious might read as cold, and either way he’s probably bleeding undecided voters by the second. Then Stefan Raab piles on from the side with something about Oliver Kahn, posture, and the King of Scotland. The ninety-minute televised debate ends. Are we any wiser? A little, maybe. Very little.
I’m watching from the fresh sheets of a new bed in my new room in a shared flat in Berlin-Kreuzberg, drinking orange juice straight from the bottle, genuinely trying to pay attention—trying to form an opinion, trying to resolve a problem that has roughly three weeks left before it resolves itself by default: I have no idea who to vote for. Or what. Or whether I’m going to vote at all.
In theory, politics is simple. You choose the people whose positions match yours, send them up the chain, and they act in your interest. Federal parliament, European parliament, the local council deciding whether a cell tower goes up near the community garden and gives my imaginary livestock headaches. But it never works that way. From experience—without descending into bar-table generalization—I know that politicians promise before elections what they cannot deliver after. Often they genuinely can’t: coalition compromises, shifting economic conditions, the slow collapse of good intentions under procedural weight. Ask them about it years later and every conceivable factor shares the blame except themselves. Meanwhile the next generation of sixty-something men in suits climbs onto stages, and the whole thing resets.
Who can blame young people for checking out? Nothing really changes. A few taxes shift in one direction, a few in another. More spending here, more revenue there. A cautious eye on Washington, a nervous one on Brussels. The programs that genuinely wanted to change something—university tuition, unemployment reform, the smoking ban—became ongoing disasters, dismantled or permanently resented. The things that land are usually the ones nobody wanted.
So I lie there and think about my options. The two major parties feel like beached whales: too large to ignore, essentially unable to move. The Greens are too committed to being the Greens. The Free Democrats too committed to being yellow. The Left too committed to being 1989. I’d vote Pirate Party, except what began as a scrappy internet-rights experiment has by now devolved into a cage of permanent arguers with no institutional memory, no governing experience, and no discernible through-line—just lurching from one inflammatory sub-topic to the next, managing to publicly humiliate themselves at every available opportunity.
Then there are the NPD posters. "Criminal foreigners out!" I walk past one near the U-Bahn stairs, pull my jacket tighter against the coming autumn, and I’m on the train—Turkish families, Spanish tourists, German construction workers—and the phrase sits in my head longer than I’d like. I turn it over. If I beat a teenager unconscious in a Tokyo train station, I’d expect to be deported. Possibly permanently. That’s just consequence logic. For a moment the reasoning almost holds. Then I catch myself sympathizing with something I know is rotten at its foundation and I shake it out fast—Anne Frank, the book burnings, the children burned up in a pointless war. Close call. Disgust at yourself is a useful emotion, actually.
I’m genuinely a little envious of friends who know exactly which party they belong to. Did they think harder about it than I have? Or not hard enough? Maybe they’re in different life positions where the calculus is clearer—marginal tax rates matter more, day-care availability is personal rather than theoretical. Would a universal basic income just push the floor upward by exactly its own amount, leaving everyone in the same relative position? Do women actually need mandatory boardroom quotas, or does that condescend to the very people it’s meant to help? I have strong-sounding opinions on both sides depending on which hour of the day it is.
Maybe I should vote purely in my own interest. That’s essentially what most people do, or claim they don’t do but do. Which party deposits the most money in my account, specifically mine, short-term and long? Forget women, children, the elderly, the poor, students. Think about Marcel. The Marcel who is 29, male, German citizen, self-employed, financially neither comfortable nor desperate, living on the internet with no children and no relatives yet in need of care. Is there a party for 29-year-old self-employed German men who spend too much time online? Probably not. And somehow voting on pure personal financial interest feels worse than not voting at all. I can’t make myself not care about other people, which is inconvenient.
There’s still the NSA reading my emails. That matters to me. Maybe the Pirates after all? But don’t the Social Democrats want to address that too? And the Greens? And isn’t it somewhat obscene to make digital privacy my primary concern when Syria is happening? Can I vote Obama out? He’s not on the ballot here, but still.
It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m in a café in Berlin-Mitte watching well-dressed people in glasses attacking their MacBooks with great intensity. Coffee, water, a warm ham-and-cheese croissant. The Wi-Fi is occasionally slow. That is my problem. Someone who can sit in a central Berlin café on a weekday afternoon, order food, and complain about Wi-Fi does not have real problems. He has opinions. Maybe opinions are enough to justify a vote, even an uncertain one. Or maybe it means the vote itself is the luxury—something I can afford to treat as a philosophical puzzle because none of the outcomes will actually destroy me.
To vote at all, I think you have to be one of three things: selfish enough to vote your wallet, naive enough to believe in promises, or genuinely good-natured enough to think beyond yourself. None of these feel entirely available to me right now. And even if I locate the correct Marcel-aligned party and vote for them and they win, there’s no guarantee that a single one of my priorities becomes policy. The political weather might shift into something terrible directly above my head. Maybe I should have gone into politics myself and arranged things to my satisfaction. But then I wouldn’t be the man in the café.
"You hold the power in your hands—you alone decide the future!" the chancellor candidate says as the debate closes, snapping me out of it. I want to believe him. The way I want to believe a laundry detergent that promises to wash my shirts whiter than white—which is, if you think about it, also slightly discriminatory. Peer Steinbrück has a lot weighing on him right now. But at least one question isn’t keeping him up at night.