How the run-up to the german election on February 23rd is going so far: [View all]

The reason why:

Germany had a coalition-government with the Social-Democrats (center-left) as the senior-partner and the Greens (environmentalists) and the Free Democrats (liberal ultra-capitalists) as the junior-partners.

The Free Democrats intentionally sabotaged the coalition in a game of political maneuvering that was supposed to end the government and make them look good in the upcoming elections, thus gaining more political power in the long run. Instead, someone leaked their cringy, grandiose, megalomanic internal memos where they laid out their plan where they imagined themselves as political masterminds.

How Germany runs elections:

Campaigning is permitted to begin only a month before the election. And the campaign finance-laws are fairly strict, so this is a rather calm affair compared to the never-ending horse-race media hysteria of US elections.

When you move into a city, you legally have to declare your official address at the city-administration. They automatically put you on the voter-roll of your precinct. Yes, voter-rolls are organized on a precinct-by-precinct basis and you only get to vote at the polling-station in your precinct. Each voter-roll has about 1000-2000 people, which is a nice, manageable number, easy to track and easy to update, compared to the US habit of mashing the millions of people of an entire state into one voter-roll.
Also, as each polling-station knows months in advance PRECISELY how many people will show up to vote, the longest queue I have ever encountered was a 10-people-15-minutes wait.

One month before the election, you get your election-notification via postal mail. It contains your name and address and a whole bunch of serial-numbers, bar-codes and QR-codes to prevent people from forging the letter. The letter 1. allows you to vote, 2. tells you precisely when and where in your precinct you get to vote, 3. tells you how to vote by mail.

On election-day, which is ALWAYS a Sunday for ANY elections, you take your letter and your official ID, go to the polling-station, they check your ID and your letter, and then they hand you the ballots.

Polls close at 6 pm. Ballots are ALWAYS counted by hand, but as each polling-station knows months in advance PRECISELY how many ballots they will have to count, it's fairly easy to organize the count in advance. The first results are coming in at 6:30pm and the "preliminary final result" is being announced at 8pm.

Who are the candidates?

The Social-Democrat Chancellor Olaf Scholz is rather weak and not very popular. I like the Social-Democrats as a party but not him personally, but I guess he'll do.

His biggest competitor is Friedrich Merz from the center-right Christian-Democrats. He's more anti-immigrant than the Christian-Democrats per se (though still far more tolerant than MAGA), which creates a lot of media-reporting and discussion.

The candidate of the far-right AfD (boosted by Elon Musk) is Alice Weidel, a right-wing conspiracy-nut who made the crucial mistake of having a softball-interview with a far-right journalist and telling the whole world what she really thinks. For example, she believes in the far-right apologetics that Hitler wasn't right-wing but actually a Communist, which is a breath-takingly stupid take, considering how much Germans actually know and care about his very part of their history.

How is the campainging going so far? How is the mood?

In Germany, there's this classic get-out-the-vote process where parties set up a booth in the pedestrian-zone on the weekends, when the inner city is full of people going shopping and passing through. They hand out flyers and promotional material and stuff.

Here is what I saw:

The small parties had problems attracting people.

The bigger parties had small crowds around their booths, with people milling about, having a calm, likable chat about something or other. You know: crowd-work.

And then there was the AfD....................... The campaign-staffers of the other parties were calm and relaxed and nice everyday-people, trying to convince voters that this is the right party for them. I walked by the booth of the AfD and overheard AfD campaign-staffers having bitter, angry, confrontational discussions with passers-by about how Germany is on the wrong track and how immigrants are bad.
I thought to myself that attacking a voter is not a good way to make him adopt your political opinions.