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Election chaos: Berlin fun democracy

2021-09-30T09:16:30.083Z


Too few ballots, confused districts, hours of waiting: when the capital votes, it's like being in a banana republic.


Enlarge image

Queue in front of a polling station in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district

Photo:

Georg Hilgemann / dpa

Berlin voted.

So that part of the population that got hold of a ballot yesterday.

In the worst governed city in Germany this is not something that can be taken for granted.

At around 2 p.m., some Berlin polling stations ran out of documents. Couriers who were supposed to organize supplies got stuck in traffic because of the Berlin marathon that was scheduled at the same time. In the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, the papers for the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district were accidentally distributed until someone noticed that the votes for the House of Representatives were invalid. In Mitte and Pankow the waiting time in front of polling stations was often more than two hours, which is why parents with children and many senior citizens left without having achieved anything.

An “unbelievable scene”, according to the Berlin “Tagesspiegel”, took place around 3:30 p.m. in front of the Münstersche Strasse polling station in Charlottenburg: an election worker explained to those waiting that there were no more ballots for the Berlin state parliament. But there are still papers on offer for the Bundestag election, maybe that would be enough for one or the other, interested parties please come forward. And while the big counting started all over Germany at 6 p.m. and the first predictions were on the TV screens, Friedrichshain was still standing in the queue in front of the polling station as usual in front of Berghain.

Yes, this is Berlin. In a banana republic, an OSCE election observation team is now on the scene to denounce the democratic deficits. In the German capital, on the other hand, the regional returning officer appears in front of the press the next day, speaks of "alleged mistakes and mishaps" and says that "actually" enough ballot papers were available. You also don't know what went wrong.

I think we Berliners live in a kind of fun democracy.

Who governs or not makes little difference, it doesn't matter, nothing works.

What should one expect from a city where the dead are not buried because the authorities are overloaded?

Presumably, many have only approved the referendum on the socialization of large housing companies because nobody expects it to be implemented anyway.

Just like the referendum on the continued operation of Tegel Airport disappeared in a drawer.

Will there be a legal follow-up to election Sunday?

Constitutional lawyer Sophie Schönberger explains today that it is unlikely that there are serious organizational deficiencies, but the right to vote is based on the assumption that the authorities are working well.

The legislature simply could not imagine conditions like in Pankow, Friedrichshain, Charlottenburg.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-09-30

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