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Historically Low Voter Turnout: Poorly Disguised Underclass Hatred

2022-05-19T12:27:07.912Z


Why doesn't a large number of people seem to care enough about voting? What the malice says about non-voters and what politics should learn from it.


Enlarge image

Female voters on their way to the polling station (archive image)

Photo: Roland Weihrauch / picture alliance / dpa

No one is hated and despised quite as fervently as non-voters, not even SUV drivers or vegans.

In the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia last weekend, they became the strongest political force with around 45 percent, stronger than the CDU, which received the most votes.

Almost every second person did not go to the ballot box last Sunday, fewer than ever before.

And it was immediately clear who was to blame, namely the citizens who refused to cast their vote.

They were smug, brazen, decadent, they said (e.g. here).  

Germany's television god, Günther Jauch, reprimanded the people in North Rhine-Westphalia from the Maischberger studio: »In the Ukraine, people are hungry for democracy.

They risk their lives for it!

And with us, the people stay at home and throw their basic rights in the bin.« You know that, you lazy losers from Gelsenkirchen.

One might argue that it is not particularly honest or fair to compare the struggle for survival in a war in which bombs are being dropped, neighbors are being kidnapped, raped and murdered to a state election in peaceful Germany, where the issue is whether one middle-aged catholic man with beard and glasses becomes prime minister or the other middle-aged catholic man with beard and glasses, but maybe those are subtleties.

By the way, when no bombs were falling in the Ukraine, when the conditions were more similar to those in Gelsenkirchen or Dortmund, not many more people went to the polls there than last Sunday in North Rhine-Westphalia.

In the 2019 Ukraine presidential election – which Volodymyr Zelenskyy won – 63 percent took part in the first ballot and 61 percent in the second ballot.

39 percent did not vote.

That's not so far removed from the 45 percent in NRW.

American conditions prevailed in NRW, complained Deutschlandfunk.

I tried to imagine Hendrik Wüst as Donald Trump, which I managed moderately.

But it's funny that people from Cologne are looking more towards the USA than towards the Middle East.

I see East German conditions in NRW as far as the low turnout is concerned.

In the first free election in 1990, 93.4 percent went to the vote.

Enthusiasm for representative democracy then declined rapidly over the years, leveling off by 50 percent. In Saxony-Anhalt it fell to 44 percent in the 2006 state election and only increased with the emergence of the AfD.

Wasn't good either.

After every election in the east with a low turnout, there was usually this or that expert who claimed that the tough east educators in the kindergartens had messed up the delicate children's souls so much that they could only become haters of democracy.

Or so.

Now the only thing missing is someone who says that the many mothers who stay at home in North Rhine-Westphalia are to blame for the low turnout.

Apparently, hardly anyone can imagine that there are people who don't care about politics or who didn't feel addressed by the election campaign.

Representative democracy works like this: When you turn eighty, you can vote fifteen times in your life as a citizen to decide which party gets a seat in the Bundestag, and maybe just as often to decide which party gets a seat in the Landtag.

The chances of becoming a member of parliament, a minister or even a chancellor are extremely slim.

They are even lower when growing up in poverty and/or in non-academic migrant households.

The vast majority of people will never decide whether or not to raise or lower taxes, how much a Hartz IV recipient gets, or whether or not German guns are shipped abroad.

You delegate these decisions to others and hope that somehow things will go well.

Most people have come to terms with this form of representation.

And it is part of a citizen's freedom not to have to vote.

There is a right to vote, no compulsory voting or even compulsory voting.

That is the difference to a sham democracy or a totalitarian state.

The attacks on non-voters are essentially poorly veiled underclass hatred, and they miss the real question: Why do large numbers of people seem unconcerned about voting?

Why is the idea so outlandish that they don't feel represented by anyone?

And that, unlike in the last election, many of them apparently felt no motivation to vote this time.

The SPD in particular felt this, 300,000 of its supporters stayed at home.

Most non-voters are poor people, and in North Rhine-Westphalia too turnout was lowest in impoverished cities such as Gelsenkirchen and Duisburg.

According to the income atlas, the per capita income per year in Gelsenkirchen is 17,015 euros, in Duisburg it is 17,741 euros.

The Cologne political scientist Christoph Butterwege says (again) that certain sections of the population no longer feel represented.

»The socially disadvantaged have the feeling that their interests are no longer considered by those responsible and they respond by not going to the polls«.

A few years ago, Butterwege ran for the Left Party as Federal President, and his wife was now a Left Party candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia.

He is not completely impartial, and yet his analysis is not wrong.

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The question of social justice – which I assume affects poor people more – has been a niche issue for some time, it is not a topic with which one can distinguish oneself.

At best, social policy is understood to distribute money according to the watering can principle, as with the relief package.

Other reform ideas have a hard time.

"We're running into a massive problem of poverty," Klaus Lederer, Berlin's Senator for Culture, recently warned in view of the massive increase in energy and living costs.

On Twitter, people are already drawing attention to their situation with the hashtag #I am poor.

And at the same time, the parties seem oddly unimaginative in terms of social policy.

The FDP Finance Minister refuses to demand higher taxes for those who have come through the crisis well, and there are those.

The Greens are perceived as an environmental party, the Left - Lederer's party - is practically in ruins.

And the SPD?

It seems as if it has become the party for double-earning academic couples with condominiums - and is also constantly dealing with some sort of past coming to terms (formerly Hartz IV, now Russia).

One could argue that Scholz made sure that the minimum wage came, but given the high costs of inflation and price increases, that will not be enough.

"We talked too much about arms deliveries and not enough about the rising cost of living," said SPD leader Lars Klingbeil after the North Rhine-Westphalia election.

At least that's an insight.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-05-19

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