Undecided

Peer Steinbrück looks completely worn out, sixty-six, former minister-president, standing against that pale blue background trying to land a blow against Angela Merkel, the Teflon woman. Black suit, striped tie, sweat on his forehead. He’s visibly wrestling with his own face—should he smile or stay serious? Either way feels like it might scare off the swing voters. His words just bounce off her like nothing. Then Stefan Raab comes at him from nowhere with something about Oliver Kahn and Scottish kings and suddenly the ninety-minute debate is over. Are we any smarter? Maybe a little.

While supporters and Twitter users are arguing about current events with terrible spelling and zero actual knowledge, I’m lying on my freshly made bed in my new apartment in Berlin-Kreuzberg, drinking orange juice straight from the bottle, trying to pay actual attention, genuinely trying, to figure out the one thing I need to decide in the next three weeks: I don’t know who to vote for. Or what. Or even if I should.

Politics could be simple. You figure out what you believe in, you find people who believe the same things, and you send them off to the Bundestag to act in your interest. Except it’s not that simple. From experience, I know that politicians promise everything before the election and deliver almost nothing after. Sometimes they can’t help it—coalitions, compromises, the economy shifts—but when you bring it up years later, it’s never actually their fault somehow, which doesn’t matter because there’s already another batch of aging men in suits ready to do the same thing all over again.

Can you blame young people for being completely exhausted by all of this? Nothing actually changes. Some taxes down, some taxes up. Spending shuffled here, funding cut there. It’s always the same pattern. And programs that actually tried to do something different—student fees, Hartz IV, smoking bans—they turned into disasters that people still complain about. So who am I supposed to vote for? The two big parties look like beached whales to me. You can’t miss them but they can barely move. The Greens are too green, the FDP too yellow, Die Linke is just nostalgia for East Germany. The Pirates came in as real rebels with tech ideals and now they’re just a basket of people arguing about everything with no experience and no actual direction, jumping from one public embarrassment to the next.

Then there’s the far right screaming about deporting criminals. I’m on the U-Bahn through Kreuzberg—Turkish families, Spanish tourists, German construction workers all crammed in—and I catch myself thinking that their stupidest slogan isn’t even entirely wrong. If I beat someone up in Japan they’d probably kick me out of the country forever. Fair enough. Then I remember Anne Frank and book burnings and children sent off to die in some pointless war and I shake the thought out of my head before I become a person I don’t want to be.

I’m kind of jealous of my friends who know exactly who they’re voting for. Did they think about it more or less? Are they just in a different life situation where different things matter? Tax brackets, daycare spots, minimum wage? Would a basic income just shift the zero line higher? Do women need corporate quotas or is that something they even want? I genuinely don’t know.

Maybe I should just focus on what’s good for me. I’m twenty-nine, self-employed, doing okay financially but not great, living on the internet, no kids, no one to take care of. So what party is even fighting for a guy like me? Actually, I just want world peace. Everyone to have food and shelter. And for the NSA to stop reading my mail. Okay, that’s concrete—maybe the Pirates? But the SPD wants that too, right? So do the Greens? Can I even demand that when there are so many bigger problems? Syria, for instance? Can’t I just vote out Obama or something?

Then I’m sitting in this café in Berlin-Mitte on a Thursday afternoon, coffee and water in front of me, waiting for a warm croissant with ham and cheese, and it hits me: if my biggest problem right now is slow WiFi, my life is doing pretty well. Can I throw away my vote? Or should I just vote for whoever puts the most money in my pocket? Just care about myself, just Marcel in the café. But that doesn’t feel right either.

To vote at all you have to be selfish or naive or good-hearted. Because even if I find the perfect party for me, what are the odds anything I actually want will happen? What if the whole political climate turns into a storm and it breaks right over my head? Maybe I should’ve gone into politics so I could arrange everything the way I wanted it. But then I wouldn’t be sitting in this café either.

The debate ends. The candidate looks at me through the screen and says You have the power. You decide the future. I want to believe that the way I want to believe detergent can wash my shirt whiter than white. But one thing Peer Steinbrück doesn’t have to worry about tonight—he doesn’t have to figure out who he’s voting for.