[ud_0]

Wahlomat was a great starting point for me as someone who is not up-to-date on current party agendas. However, its weakness is that it breaks down answers into yes/no options. For me there were lots of items that required more than that (for example: I was looking for parties who reject the premise of a given question - I would have loved a graphical indicator for those cases). But I have to say, drilling down to get that information was not only possible with the website but was easier than hunting for a given stance on a party's website.

The structural problem (or feature) in Germany is that voting for a party who is not expected to pass 5% in total votes is basically the same as not voting at all. For me as a holder of niche opinions, this is inconvenient. Of course, everybody knows this feature exists to prevent the recurrence of a Weimar Republic-style desaster.

I do wish we (Western-style democracies in general) would make more use of direct democratic measures. Barring that, I would absolutely love to give my mandate to several parties in different areas (for example, give my mandate to the Pirate Party on IP matters, but give it to someone else on social policy).

[soco]

I would always assume that when a single-issue party gets elected, they would push mostly on that issue. Because if someone sympathizes with the Pirates, they do because of the core message, not because of their social policies (which any party is required to answer but some care less)

[MagnumOpus]

It's a sensible assumption to make, but unfortunately it doesn't happen that way.

A successful single-issue party that has ill-defined goals in other areas is a ripe target for people pushing other single-issue agendas to insinuate those into the party programme.

In my view this caused the death of the German Pirate Party - the initial impression of "generally centrist, but competent and uncompromising on tachnology/IP/privacy" among the electorate was quickly shifted to "wokesters and economic leftists who are way more extreme than even the Left Party" because the initial members were infiltrated and supplanted by leftist political activists...

[soco]

But this should be a safe recipe for disaster, shouldn't it? Like the sister comment says, if they don't even bother to advertise on their initial topics anymore, they are for all matters a different party now... so disappointing. I suppose the vote analysis websites should be able to uncover this quickly, otherwise they'd be failing their own goals.

[gurkendoktor]

Speaking of the German Pirate Party, I found it interesting that I haven't seen a single election poster about technology or direct democracy this year. The ones I saw were exclusively about the 1.5° climate goal, the gender wage gap, and another social topic that I forgot. Not sure if that's an actual strategy, or just the preferred way to empty their wallets while they have no chance to cross the frustrating 5% firewall anyway.

[soco]

If they would have continued on their defining issue, maybe the 5% could have been attained, because privacy and security scandals to bank on are a-plenty. Oh well.

[imtringued]

A lot of young people starting voting green because they were against upload filters. Then they stayed because the rest of the policy package is solid.