this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Elections have devolved into a popularity contest about who gets to scam you for the next couple years.
Just from my personal experience, all of German politics is corrupt from bottom to top and back.
Municipal politics in my small rural community consists of a bunch of people performing the nifty magic trick of transforming a barren field they happen to own into lucrative building plots through the magic of zoning legislation. Some of them even openly admit to only running for council in order to do that.
The connections with businesses run so deep that some of the people running for office are the same business owners profiting from it. It's only nepotism if there is a middle man, I guess.
On topics that aren't profiting them personally, those people will resort to a level of petty bickering along party lines that would make Kindergarten age children sink into the ground in embarrassment. Any idealists who try actually serving the population rather than their own (or their party leadership's) self interest will be put in their place and/or or bullied out by the established (party) hierarchies.
New political groups pretty much only arise from bizarre, yet well funded NIMBY organisations, of course funded by local business owners to further their (business) interests.
Yes, the "Klüngel" has a very long tradition in Germany - from carnival clubs in Cologne and Düsseldorf, to beer tent friendships or fraternities in Munich and elsewhere, to the Rotary and Lions Clubs in pretty much every German city. But I still agree that things have gotten much worse in recent years.
It's a crying shame, especially as many voters either still let themselfs be fooled by the pretended bickering of the parties or can't do much on their own to actually change anything. They don't see, don't want to see or just watch helplessly as the majority of at least the top politicians pursue the same goals despite their apparent differences: Unscrupulous self-enrichment and favoritism at the expense of the citizens and even future generations.