This is a combined blog entry for the months of August & September. I wasn't too well some of the time, but am now fitter. I.a. to blog a little.

KULTURBRAUEREI

This pleasant multi-storeyed cinema is part of the more than a century old 'Brauerei complex, which used to be a famous Berlin brewery but is now a conglomerate of shop & cultural locations. It is placed in one of the most lively East-Berlin areas, so there is always somewhere to go after the movie. It demonstrates how Berlin can be, un-gentrified.

How I will vote

Tomorrow is general election in Germany. You get to vote twice as usual, one vote for a local candidate (good old Westminster system, winner takes all of that voting "circle"), another for the party in parliament. So the latter actually determines the ratio of seats, and thereby determines who of the chancellor candidates will become head honcho (usually the one from the party with the most 2nd votes). Any parties who gain less than 5% of the national 2nd vote are not considered.

This vote splittability BTW, together with Southern-German voting behaviour, causes the German Bundestag to constantly grow in no. of seats, thus also costing us taxpayers more and more money every cycle. Currently parliament's already about a fifth larger than originally intended. Something that especially the C(hristian) parties don't seem to give a damn about, since they keep causing the growth as well as blocking any reform.

So, with these 2 big votes I will be voting for the SPD this tumultous time, for the first time ever in my life. Indirectly therefore for Olaf Scholz, who is a very smooth stoic politician, not too good at transparency on several counts, but the most experienced & moderate chancellor-wannabe; I feel we need Merkel-grade moderation while still within the latest Corona infection wave. I'm not going for the Greens for several reasons, one of them being that at the time of Joschka Fischer's ascendance, decades ago, they talked big about better/fairer handling of foreigners entering Germany, but essentially ended up doing nothing real once in power. The FDP is a liberal party only in name, or for a certain commercial/rich clientel. And "The Left" are basically day-dreamers, at least on a national level, who always say what left-leaners - like me - want to hear, but never aught about how to finance it or turn it into viable law.

But tomorrow I will also be voting for the Berlin state stuff, with a similar system as on the national scale, one vote for a local district representative, and another for the proportional distribution within the Berlin city parliament.

The party I will vote for here will be the Pirates; they are the last true liberal party left in Germany, I feel, and deserve recognition for that. Even if they have no chance of taking the 5% hurdle. I also like what the Berlin section writes in their manifest about how to handle asylum & migration, as well as their very concrete ideas about how to help save the environment (little bowing to the climate change hype).

If she appears on any of the personal voting lists, I will also make my cross next to the name of Green candidate Bettina Jarasch, whose views sound more considered & humane than several of her co-candidates'. She also spent younger years in Bavaria, like me, and is an outsider in the party (e.g. by being a practising Catholic). Outsiders tend toward realism as a rule, in my experience.

P.S.: If you have German citizenship, go vote tomorrow! Don't support more motivated extremist voters (e.g. for the near-Neo-Nazi AfD party) by letting their vote numbers weigh more due to the absence of your vote...