Make a mark with the cross
Twelve times I have already made my crosses in parliamentary elections. I was there when Willy Brandt became chancellor when the Greens moved into parliament when Helmut Kohl was simply not to be eliminated for sixteen years, when Gerhard Schröder made the change, and finally, when Angela Merkel first took over the government.
Although this election campaign in 2009 may be so boring that the 62 million voters are stunned by yawning, I always found it exciting to vote. It is incomprehensible to me how it can be that the number of non-voters has doubled in the last ten years. According to polls, a quarter are still undecided on whether to vote. Is not there anything left in this country? Not about nuclear power, Afghanistan, climate, education?
Ingrid Kolb
Especially women should not forget: It is not even a hundred years ago that they are allowed to vote in Germany at all. After the First World War, when the country was in ruins due to male megalomania, they were granted this right. For the first time in the Reichstag elections on 19 January 1919, not only the men went to the polls.
130 years earlier, Olympe de Gouges proclaimed during the French Revolution: "If the woman has the right to rise on the scaffold, the speaker's rostrum must also be open to her." It later landed under the guillotine, and the French women were given full suffrage only in 1945.
With particularly hard bandages was fought in England. At the beginning of the 20th century, the suffragettes delivered street battles with the police there, repeatedly putting them in jail and ruining their health through hunger strikes. The martyr was Emily Davison, who threw herself at the famous English Derby in Epsom in front of the king's horse and it came to death.
Anyone who participates in the general election determines politics
But the courage of all those women who won the suffrage for us today would prevent me from simply ignoring and wasting it. On top of that, it's just a pleasure for me to have a very direct say in who rules in our country. Non-voters, whether they like it or not, support the strongest party and may help the extremes over the five percent hurdle. Of course I do not necessarily achieve my desired result with my voice. And, yes, it is especially difficult to decide in this election year. But non-dialing is not a solution. Non-voting is stupid and even more boring than the blatant election campaign.
There is a direct candidate in my constituency whom I would normally vote for because I belong to his party. He has but tricked his lineup, has another quite unfair boomed. I do not want to have such people in the Bundestag. Every time I pass his poster, I hiss at him: "You do not !?
We have the strength? at least once every four years!
To person: Ingrid Kolb was head of the department and author at STERN before she took over the management of the Henri Nannen School of Journalism of Gruner + Jahr Publishing in Hamburg in 1995 as successor to Wolf Schneider. She left school in late 2006 and has since worked as a freelance journalist and lecturer.