What do you think? Personally I’m all for it. I think it’s important to have as many young people involved in politics to counteract the old majority.
Coming from Austria where the voting age is 16 I have to say I’m surprised to find out it isn’t the same in Germany.
The idea of myself at 16 voting terrifies me. I was basically a communist back then. I think you should let younger people (under 20) vote, ONLY if they have jobs and pay taxes. If they don’t pay tax and are still living with mommy and daddy, they don’t know what the real world is like.
I think this will be a huge win, only for virtue signalling politics, current trend or reactionary politics, or ideas pushed by teachers.
I think it’s fine in theory. However, like the other commenter mentioned, it might not be with the best intentions. Young voters, like older voters, tend to be easier to manipulate.
At this point in time we also could get ChatGPT manage this land… I don’t think it would make a difference to lower the age. The „babyboomer“ are way more active in the voting than the younger generation :s So yes pleas lower the age to vote, also we need a maximum age for the Parlament!
Ah yes, let a language model decide politics, and ignore a few percent of potential voting power. I’d laugh if I didn’t suspect you were serious.
The first part isn’t serious you’re right. The rest of it is. I don’t thing it would make a big different to lower the voting age in the outcome. And i don’t think it is a good idea, i remember my first voting i had no idea what to vote so i have vote “the lesser worst option” that i know to that time. It has to change more than the voting age in this system to work properly again…
My situation was the same as yours, but I think it would have been like that no matter what age. I’m not sure it’s a good idea either, but fact is there are kids who’re politically active and can’t vote, and that seems a little silly. Democracy’s whole thing is that it doesn’t exclude.
There’s not a lot of good arguments against lowering the voter age limit if you try to debate this policy in a way that is agnostic of which parties one thinks will benefit.
Same but reverse about the other election reform from this government - if it wasn’t for CSU and the Left being the biggest losers of that reform, I don’t think many would agree that it’s democratic to just toss out the votes of one election (direct mandate) based on the outcome of a separate election (proportional vote).
In short: When you are party-agnostic: 16+ vote is okay, the hasty patch for the parliament size is not.
I think the main argument is that 16 y.o. are old enought to work and pay taxes and social contributions. So they should be able to vote. Also The voting age is 16 in many states. The maturity argument is really hard, as it depends so much on the individual. I think 16 year olds generelly possess the same mental capacity to understand party policies and have enough knowledge of how the government system works to be able to vote.
In fact, I find any argument that relies on the “maturity” or “capacity” of the voter extremely suspicious. There are people even today that genuinely believe that franchise must be restricted by means of literacy/mental capacity tests (transparent attempts to disenfranchise political opponents, be it conservatives fearing a more progressive youth or progressives fearing a more conservative older population).
The argument of relevance/degree of exposure to political decisions is indeed much better, than even going doing the maturity rabbit hole and trying to argue for a lower voter age that way.
Throwing out all of the direct mandate votes would be democratic again, though.
