The German Elections

I was going to write an ode to public transport, having recently gotten back on the rush hour trains. But today, elections in Germany took place and I am currently watching live streams of the results.

I voted in this election, my first time ever actually voting in a German election. I was torn, like many other Germans, even those living in Germany, on whether it was even worth voting.
I don’t live in Germany, I haven’t lived there for 15 years and I won’t be impacted a lot, or explicitly, by internal politics and policies. Here is an interesting blog post on the voting vs not-voting issue living abroad as a German (post is in German).

What I care about is how the results of this election affect Europe. Especially, with recent developments regarding European politics and what it means for me, as a European. I had no clue who to vote for. My gut was telling me that Angela Merkel might be good for Europe. She is considered a powerful and strong leader within the international scene. However, I don’t agree with a lot of things she and her party does or stand for.

I did a lot of reading, several online tests and watched a debate. The results of the tests annoyed me and were skewed because I only filled them in 50% (again, not everything concerns me). In the end, I pinpointed the main concerns for me and voted for a smaller party, with which I mostly agreed with, as I knew, that nothing major would change if either CDU or SPD would win (at least for me).

So here we are, results and discussions are happening, mainly why the AfD received so many votes and what this means for the country…Maybe this will wake people up.