After a phone call to a friend, TheEditor was persuaded to try the "Election wizard" Wahl-O-Mat, a handy site where you are asked lots of questions (28 for the German general election in a few weeks) and are presented with one or more parties whose campaign program matches your selections best. Should be fun even if you don't vote, after all, the Canadians did not send me a passport either when I had successfully done their online citizenship test.
The site is run by the Federal Political Education Center, a government institute that has been around for 60 years and whose efforts include presentations, publications and field trips, for instance to Israel.
The crucial thing about the website: it is in German only.
While this does make some sense, wouldn't it be nice for the average European or the average non-Deutsch-speaking journalist to have a handy overview of the big election issues and a side by side list of the positions of several parties for each question?
It shouldn't be too difficult to crowdsource a translation of 28 questions and the few user interface bits.
We'll give two real questions as teasers:
1) Should Germany leave NATO?
2) Are you in favor of a national minimum wage?
For each question, you select "yes", "no", or "neutral". You can also skip a question if you do not want to answer. At the end, you get to select up to eight political parties from the list of parties that participate by providing answers to the institute for the election.
The click next, and see how your answers fare in the political dating game.
Would you like to know what the best matches for TheEditor were?
Sorry....
Other fun facts: there are currently five political parties in the German federal parliament.
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