Hello everyone,
And welcome back one last time to the German Election Weeks Special!
It’s finally over, the results are in, and as usual, the polls were highly accurate.
No, I do not mean this ironically. The polls are really on point usually.
So yeah, the election is over and today is going to be the last day we’ll talk about German politics for a long while. Big promise :).
But because many of you wanted a part three about the German election topics, we’ll do just that today.
Wahl-O-Mat Review – Part 3
We’ll go over the last 14 questions together, and I’ll give you some context and insight into the current situation. Not all of them are terribly interesting, but there are some “big” ones in there, like abortion or minimum wage and taxes to some extent.
And of course, I’ll also look at the language used again, but there aren’t really many new surprises.
So yeah… not the most fascinating article maybe, but all good things are three :).
If you want to check out the other two episodes, you can find them here:
And also this one:
But before we dive in to the Wahl-O-Mat questions, I want to give you a quick summary of the election results.
So if you’re ready, let’s jump right in.
Find out more
All lessons, tools and premium features (and there’s a LOT of them :).
Already a member?
Audio Speed
Dark Mode
I just stumbled across this series of articles (from before I started following the site) and really enjoyed them. Pretty untimely, but one langugage related comment:
While “dips” seems like it would make sense (“he dipped into his savings” would be completely understandable), the term is actually “first dibs”. The expression tends to be used by children. (Picture kids running toward an empty playground. One of them yells, “I call dibs on the slide!” The kid means it and expects to have the others honor that.) Although it can be used by adults, more often it is in an ironic, humorous, or tounge-in-cheek manner which evokes childhood or childishness in some manner. (A group of college boys walk into a bar with several women and one says, “I’ve got dibs on the redhead!” He may be interested, but he understands that calling dibs is meaningless in that context.)
I did not know the etymology of this, but it apparently originates with a children’s game, which makes sense:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-origin-dibs
Hey hey, happy you found this series, even after the fact.
And thanks for clearing up “dibs”! I was aware that it’s not exactly a proper word choice in the context, so I did mean to use it for its “casual” effect, to break the formality of the discussion.
But I didn’t know it was “dibs”. Cool to know where it comes from too. It’s always fascinating when a game term enters general language like that and I guess it happens right in front of our eyes as well with a lot of gamer speak. Maybe 100 years from now people will just use a phrase that was coined by some Twitch-Streamer and they don’t even know where it’s from.
Should be able to be prosecuted sounds ok to me.
Should be subject to prosecution may be a little more elegant.
Attempt at posting picture
It does show up, but actually, it shouldn’t, I thought I had disabled that :)
Is nobody else excited about the shenanigans Lucy and Ethel can get into if Fred becomes chancellor of Germany? Oktoberfest beer hijinx? Messing up proceedings at the Reichstag? A production of „Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” with Cassandra?
Seriously, I knew very little about current German politics before reading this article. Leave it to Emanuel to take a dense and complex issue and present it in a clear, concise and fascinating article. I’m shocked to know some of the same destructive political themes get mileage in Germany like they do in the US. But as for the messenger, this is a fantastic labor that should be the starting point for anyone interested in Germany or modern European politics. Bravo, E!
I don’t get the reference about Lucy and Ethel to be honest :).
As for the destructive political themes … it’s not just Germany, it’s all of Europe and I think even Asia and Africa.
This is a Zeitgeist phenomenon, which now sweeps over the globe.
The US is the loudest with it and I would wager that it would maybe not be such a wave if it weren’t “approved” by the US. The United States is by far the biggest exporter of culture and Zeitgeist. People in the former East Germany for instance are usually skeptical of the US and still, they will bring up Trump and Elon now all the time because it’s basically “Daddy” giving them “permission” to express what they want to express.
Many in the AfD say, Germany is just a vasal state of the US or is still half occupied and they fly “Ami go home” flags at their protests, yet they
get an orgasm when Elon and Vance say some nice things about them and they take it as the biggest approval ever. Weidel (AfD) was embarrassing in how much she sucked up to Elon in their interview.
So they think they don’t like the US, and yet, they look to it for approval and cultural talking points. They don’t watch Russian podcasts or Chinese Podcasts. The watch American podcasts.
I’m not saying that this wave of Zeitgeist is the fault of the US. My view is that these things just have more “room” in the US to be expressed, which is one of the country’s strengths after all. Freedom of human expression, in any direction, good and bad.
The world still takes many cultural cues from the US. Like… oh we can be clown-populist now? Awesome, let’s do it.
It’s a bit embarrassing now to hear people from CDU CSU fawn over DOGE and how we need that here, without knowing anything about anything DOGE related. Elon Musk, buzz buzz, cut spending buzz buzz, efficiency buzz buzz.
But the idea of cutting back government or making it more efficient is not new, it’s just that it’s been given a flashy US style marketing now that the boring CDU CSU folk could never come up with themselves.
Sorry for the rant, which wasn’t even meant as a rant.
One of my favorite public thinkers says what we’re currently seeing is just the prelude to what we’ll face in the 2030s. He says our Democracies have left the bay and are in open waters now, which feels bumpy in a way we’re not used to. This image resonates with me a lot. We need to learn seafaring.
Really enjoyed the breakdown of the parties & results, probably the most out of all of this week’s election-themed posts
Enjoyed hearing your opinions on things too, mostly sensible stuff and even when you said ‘eh I lean this way even if I haven’t really looked into it’, i relate since I sort of vibe in a certain direction on an issue but don’t really hold a strong stance either way
Never mind any haters in the comments, you were quite even-keeled in your commentary
84% is crazy high compared to the US where i think mid-60% voter turnout is considered really really good
realizing this isnt a politics blog and i can just google it im kind of intrigued by CDU/CSU and how they operate and get along and if there’s ever any internal friction b/t the two, all i know is that CSU is basically the bavarian CDU
In the US there’s thr DFL in minnesota (Democratic-Farmer-Labor party) which for all intents and purposes is the Democratic party (a similar situation also in north dakota)
re: pensions, young people don’t talk about it AT ALL in america, mostly ’cause it’s a retirement plan that doesn’t really exist anymore outside of old people (retirement plans are mostly 401(k)s here eg you put in x% of your paycheck towards retirement and the company will match y% of that), but young people are mostly talking about pay, rent, finding an apartment absolutely none of my millennial friends/gen z coworkers talk about pensions. My millennial friends sometimes joke about how the social security system will be insolvent by the time we retire but that’s it
“Should be able to be prosecuted” sounds fine to me. Prosecuted can be used in a couple ways so that sentence is perfectly normal
I will prosecute the case
The attorney general prosecuted the case
Or you can be the recipient
He was prosecuted under the law
The chemical company is under prosecution for illegally dumping plutonium in the river
So to say a 14-year-old is able to be prosecuted sounds 100% normal to me
Re CDU/CSU:
I’m not aware of any relevant friction there. I think CSU in part is just a way for Bavarians to satisfy their sense of exceptionalism.
There was a moment back in 2005 when Gerhard Schröder lost to Merkel, where he tried to drive a wedge between the parties.
He argued on TV that SPD has the strongest share of the vote because CDU and CSU are in fact two separate parties, so it’s the SPD who is the strongest.
It was a bit of Trumpian moment back then in the sense that he tried something really out there that no normal politician would seriously consider. He was also quite petulant in that TV interview to the point of being cringe. He was ahead of his time then :).
I don’t mind the haters. There weren’t really any haters actually, at least I didn’t feel that way. People online are so heated up right now that I am super happy at how civil the comment section stayed. And discussion, even hard discussion, is necessary and productive, as long as everyone enters with the goal of making things better, and not just “scoring points”.
Oh fun fact I wasn’t aware of till this election:
There’s a party of the Danish minority in Schleswig-Holstein and because of some old treaty with Denmark, the 5% hurdle doesn’t apply to them. I think they have one seat now.
Math geek here. Your numbers don’t add up in the taxes and insurance section. The total is actually €508 making it 26% of the monthly paycheck. €1442 to take home. Don’t know if that changes anything significantly for you, but as someone taking care of the finances for a family of 12, I know every Euro makes a difference for us!
Thanks for the articles in this series. They were super helpful and I appreciate your civil discourse!
Oh, you’re right, thank you!!!
I didn’t calculate this myself, I used one of the many Brutto-Netto-Rechner online, and they listed the total spend on social security (health, pension, long term care, unemployment) as the last line item before take home pay, and I accidentally thought this was total deductions.
Thanks for catching that, I fixed it now.
Regarding the following sentence from the Handelsblatt:
The “Es” was bothering me, but I googled it. I feel wobbled. But I like it.
This “es” is a dummy placeholder.
It doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t stand for anything; it’s just there because the author wanted to have both legit elements (time, subject) to the right.
– Seit Monaten werden keine neuen Inhalte produziert.
Here, the “es” is gone and you can NOT just put it in after “werden”. That’s the test for whether you’re looking at a functional “es” or a dummy.
I have an article about that :)
Thanks for that. As I was presenting my case to you, I thought, for shame’s sake Google it first, which I did. There was a Reddit post by someone with the same concern.
Re “Under 14-year-olds should be able to be prosecuted”
We are more likely to phrase it completely differently and use the phrase “lower the age of criminal responsibility ‘
Hello!
I forgot to ask you if there is some distinction in usage between “Abteilung” and “Schwangerschaftsabbruch. For example, can you say, “zwei Abteilungen or zwei Schwangerschaftsabbrüche”?
Thanks. Fredrick Adams
You mean “Abtreibung” :).
“Schwangerschaftsabbruch” and “Abtreibung” are synonyms. The latter sounds a bit “rougher”, but it’s the older word.
I truly enjoyed it as usual. Even though you might think that with the articles on German politics and the German election , we lacked the usual German language content study, but the “Language used” content for each question made up for it in my opinion.
I would be elated if we, in the United States, had an 84% voting participation rate. Ours is way short of that. Thanks for the review of “soll” versus “sollte.” For some reason, it made more sense this time. Oh, by the way, saying “Those under 14 should be able to be prosecuted” sounds perfectly fine to me. Should there not be an ending on “freiwillig” in the expression “freiwillig Helper”?
Thanks again for the three-part series on politics!
Oh, yes.. freiwilligE Helfer. Great catch!! And happy to hear you enjoyed the series.
Thank you! Great catch, but I misspelled “Helfer.” ( Smile)
Why didn’t you include audio recordings for the Wahl-o-Mat questions?
Just joking. You did a lot of work. Today I put my Handelsblatt sentences on hold, and I memorized and recited all these 14 questions. What a pain! But also, what a gain.
Regarding compensating people for their volunteer work with retirement benefits, that sounds like a pretty bad idea. I’m sure it won’t fly.
Here’s an interesting fact which you may or may not be aware of: Retirement funding as a concept, has a German origin. It was the idea of Bismarck.
Hey. I got AfD :3
Believe it or not, I still think the AfD is bs and they’re probably just the controlled opposition aspect of German politics
It’s all theater
I wouldn’t completely disagree. They have some very rich backers who definitely also talk to CDU/CSU. Like I said in the article or some other comment (don’t remember)… if it weren’t for the actual Nazi types that are also in the party, the CDU would form a coalition with them.
Hi! I just got my sponsorship account and wanted to say a huge THANK YOU for this opportunity! I really appreciate it! (ㅅ´ ˘ `)✧
That it’s the rich pushing society to the right is one of the funnier things I’ve read in a while. Who pushes society when it’s heading left, “the people”?
Yes, though of course also in the form of institutions, NGOs and so on.
And the people can also push a society right, of course.
But the density of rich and super rich people who own media and think tanks and manufacture societal conversations are mainly on the right (and IMO mainly because they want to save taxes).
The Greens were polling at 22% in mid 2022, being the second biggest party. CDU was polling at 27% and SPD at 19%.
Then started a 3 year non stop anti-greens campaign by Welt, Bild and to an extend also Spiegel, podcasts and other small media outlets constantly trashing the Greens with negative press. It worked as intended.
Hey Emanuel, did you know that the word “nazi” is actually an abbreviation? It was originally used for people who “Do not see my point of view”, but it was said so often that it became a single word and even the rest of the phrase fell away, so now we’re left (or should I say right?) with just “nazi”.
Since you do a lot of word origin stuff in this blog, I thought I’d throw my two cents, maybe get you to do a full article on the history of the word. Though that maybe won’t be necessary. A lot of people already know the phrase and are well aware of what people mean with it. I’d even say the majority of the population by the next 4 years. Crazy how fast info spreads!
Nazi is originally short for Nationalsozialist, but I think you know that.
I think you wrote the comment the way you wrote it because you felt attacked by things I said in the article or in the comments.
I’m well capable to distinguish between an actual Nazi and a right wing person who has different views than I do, and I actually do think it’s important to not use Nazi as a blanket term for anybody who is conservative and anti-immigration.
I don’t think I threw around the term thoughtlessly, but if you think I did, let me know where.
Hi!
remquestion 33 about whether those below the age of 14 should be prosecutable…
Hope this makes sense!
If your take-home pay is $1450 a month and you live in Berlin, is there any chance of finding a decent place to live? Decent meaning clean and in good repair.
The federal minimum wage here is $7.25 an hour. If you work full-time (lots of minimum wage jobs are part-time), you’ll make about $15,000 a year and take home maybe $1,000 a month, depending on where you live. If you live in a really cheap area and don’t have any other choice, you might be able to painfully scrape by on that. But it’s nowhere close to a livable wage, and you might not get any vacation or benefits.
Freedom to work longer if you want…in theory, I could agree with that. I guess it depends on if you really do want it, how often it happens, and how well you get paid for it. But really, I’m allergic to that statement because over here, it usually means “you’re gonna work long hours and you’re gonna like it.” The longest days I’ve had were 16-24 hours.
Pensions….I think I heard of those once in a story.
Is there any chance? Yes, but it’s small. The rents vary a LOT based on how long people have been living in their apartments, so someone who moved in 15 years ago might pay half of what the neighbor pays for the same size apartment who moved in 2 months ago.
Finding a new apartment means higher rent and I think you’d need to calculate at LEAST 700 including extra bills like electricity or internet.
And that’ll not be anywhere near the center.
There’s the so called WBS (Wohnberechtigungsschein), which is a certificate of low income basically, that gives you the right to apply to certain apartments that are designated for low income people. Those are MIXED IN with normal apartments and you can get a kick ass flat for a decent price BUT… the main problem is that there are way too many people looking for apartments here. One apartment might get 1000 applicants within an hour before they pull the ad.
I’d say the problem here are not the prices. They do sting, but even high income fully employed people sometimes search for over a year, because it’s a bit like a lottery.
What’s easier is to do a flatshare, but rents there are typically 700+ now, because (I suspect) most of the people offering them are taking a little cut to help with their own rent.
Freedom to work longer… yeah, it’s a fine line, because employers will absolutely abuse any leeway and exploit the weakest who can’t choose.
Maybe the regulation needs to be there, and then, if an employee wants to work longer, and the boss is okay with it, they can just do it. Wo kein Kläger, da kein Richter.
People in the medical sector do work longer on a regular basis.
But I don’t think we’ve got something like what I’ve seen in Bulgaria where a nurse in a somewhat fancy clinic comes in the morning, and leaves at midnight with a 3 hour “free-time” break in between, and she’s happy to be working at all. This is inhumane IMO and unnecessary and does end up in fancy villas and sports cars for the owner of the clinic.
Is it normal to have one-year leases, and is there any limit on how much rent can go up every year? Just wondering how it works if your rent goes up a lot in the time it takes to find a new apartment. Maybe you just have to deal with it.
In the apartments I’ve had, it’s normal for the rent to go up 10% a year. A little less if you’re lucky, and sometimes more. But in a lot of places, there’s nothing to stop the landlord from raising it as much as they want, and there’s even software that encourages that.
One year leases are rare in the overall market, but they’re gaining “popularity” (from investors) in big cities where they rent out furnished short term rentals, because they don’t always fall under the same rental law restrictions that a normal contract would have. Needless to say that they’re overpriced.
There is a cap about how much rent can be raised within two years. Maybe 10% but I’d have to check.
Many contracts have something called a Staffelmiete, which says in the contract that after 1 year, rent will rise by 1 Euro per m2 for 5 years.
Also popular are “Indexmiete” where the rent rises along with inflation, which in theory would also mean it could fall, if consumer price index has fallen over the reference period.
85% of people in Berlin rent, and the laws are very renter friendly, at least when you look at them from the eyes of a person who is used to North American markets.
Interesting! Thanks for the info.
A small typo in the minimum wage section:
„A person working for minimum wage in Berlin full-time (160 hours a week)“
I certainly hope no one is working 160 hrs/week
Thanks for the orientation regarding the recent federal election in Germany, and for sharing your personal insights into some of the relevant policy issues. Sehr interessant.
I think “should be liable for prosecution” works. To my mind simply “should be prosecutable” would be the most direct and elegant way.
Can people be prosecutable? I thought it was only deeds…