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Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:
- Voters being more aware of their history (a “… doomed to repeat it” sort of thing)
- Better at spotting populist lies (I don’t know enough about German politics to know how populist the Left Party is)
- Leading more comfortable lives, thus less inclined to reach for extremes.
It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.
Maybe voting should be by policy. Each party lists, say, their top 8 policy points as a simple summary sentence each (has to be more concrete than just an aspiration like “protect our economy”). The combined points are randomised and printed on the voting paper. Voter marks all the policies they agree with. Each policy agreed with counts as a vote for that party (so each party can get more than one vote per person). The party with most points agreed with by the voters wins. If the winning party goes back on or does anything in contradiction to any of the policies they listed, the media has something solid to grill them on, and maybe could be some sort of trigger for a new election.
Elections results by age supports what I’ve been feeling for a while now - capitalism reduces our capacity to dream of a better world, to believe we all deserve a better life, takes away hope.
Once in the job market, people become competitive and enter the debt cycle, slowly losing capacity for empathy.
Another interesting figure is, how voters have transferred to AFD:
- 1.8M come from previously non-voters
- 1M from CDU/CSU (Christian conservatives)
- 890k from FDP (Liberal capitalistes)
My 2-cents analysis about this, the right parties have decided to fight on AFD’s turf, focus their campaign on immigration, insecurity, reduce welfare, shifting the whole debate to the extreme right, in an attempt to steal the voters from AFD. But very predictively, this only help to legitimize the extreme right rhetoric et topics and unsurprisingly traditionally right voters ended up voting for extreme right this time.
