It's not exactly the 'Superwahljahr' - or super election year - we experienced back in 2021, but this year, four federal states will go to the polls. Berlin is repeating its state and local council elections on February 12th, while Bremen hits the ballot box in May and both Bavaria and Hesse cast votes this autumn.
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That means the Wahl-O-Mat is already making its way through German news sites and on social media – especially in Berlin, which is set to vote in a matter of weeks.Â
But what is it - and how do Germans use it?
The Wahl-O-Mat has been a project of the Federal Centre for Political Education (bpb) since 2002. Since then, it’s been regularly made available during national, state, and European elections in Germany.
It’s essentially a quiz of 38 questions, each one reflecting a different political issue in a statement. For each one, you say whether you agree, disagree, or are neutral.
An editorial team of young voters across Germany picks out possible questions and sends them to representatives of political parties to answer. Voters can they see who they match up with based on whether their answers line up with the ones political parties have given. For the federal election in 2021, they included questions like:
- A speed limit should be introduced on all German Autobahns
- Germany should spend more on defence
- Cannabis should be legalised
- Dual citizenship should be allowed in general
- The minimum wage should be raised to €12 an hour by 2022
After you’ve put in your answers, you can click on particularly important statements concerning issues you care more about. The quiz will then give those double weighting.
You then select the political parties you’re considering and the Wahl-O-Mat will give you percentages of how much you align with the views of each of those parties.
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Do people use it?
Yes. The Wahl-O-Mat for Berlin’s upcoming February 12th election has already been used nearly 60,000 times, at the time of this writing, with more than two weeks to go before voting day.
For the most recent federal election in 2021, Germans used the Wahl-O-Mat almost 22 million times. Just over 60 million people in Germany had the right to vote in the 2021 election, with around 76 percent turning up.
Are there criticisms of it?
Yes. The Wahl-O-Mat has sometimes been criticised for the types of questions it chooses, or trying to distill complex issues down to a simple yes or no answer. For these reasons, both the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania refused to cooperate with the Wahl-O-Mat during the 2006, 2011, and 2016 state elections there.
Alternative choices exists too, which put more weight on certain subjects. These include Sozial-O-Mat, which concentrates only on social policy questions, and Klimawahlcheck, which focuses on climate change.
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