Dhe Mayor of Tübingen, Boris Palmer, accuses the state center for political education in Baden-Württemberg of “agitation” in the dispute over the Wahl-O-Maten for the mayoral election. He said the responsible employee, who developed the candidate-o-mat with an editorial team made up of students, journalists and political scientists, confused political education with agitation. On October 23, Palmer will face the electoral vote in the university town for the third time. Palmer is currently having to suspend his membership of the Greens because of numerous expressions of opinion that his party considers racist. The district councilor Ulrike Baumgärtner, who was officially nominated by the Greens, and the management consultant Sofie Geisel for the SPD are up against him. Both challengers would like to use the tool to mobilize voters in any case and have suggested having a candidate-O-Mat programmed by a private company if necessary.
Palmer discovered three errors in the questions: For example, he criticized the fact that the catalog of questions states: “The city should support the soup kitchen much more.” However, the soup kitchen is not financed from the city budget. Palmer also takes issue with the fact that the list of questions includes topics that are not part of local politics, such as identity politics or property taxes. That’s true, but Palmer has been involved in talk shows and opinion pieces in debates on national and international politics for years. It is also criticized that political content is presented in a simplified way with the tool. This cannot be avoided, but it is typical of election campaigns.
An editorial team made up of students, journalists from SWR and Schwäbisches Tagblatt, two scientists from the University of Freiburg and employees from the state headquarters wrote down 150 questions for the Candidate-O-Mat and sent around 70 of them to the incumbent and all applicants. The politicians should examine the questions and explain their position on each question with a statement of 300 characters. Palmer had resisted this, and the former mayor of Freiburg, Dieter Salomon (Greens), and the mayor of Konstanz, Ulrich Burchardt (CDU), have also repeatedly criticized the state headquarters’ mobilization tool.
Is the state headquarters withdrawing the offer?
Lothar Frick, the director of the state headquarters, had to cut short his vacation, he sees the neutrality of the state headquarters at risk if the Candidate-O-Mat questions were widely discussed in public and also became part of the election campaign. “We are ground between political interests. The question is whether the neutrality and impartiality of the state headquarters can still be secured,” said Frick in an interview with the FAZ. When preparing the questionnaire, mistakes were made in terms of content, which is why the questionnaire will be revised together with the media partners and then sent to the candidate again. Frick said he could not yet say whether the instrument could actually still be used in the election campaign from the beginning of September. “We will also have to ask ourselves as the state headquarters whether we, as the responsible persons, can continue to make this instrument available.” A candidate-O-Mat is also to be programmed for the mayor election in Heidelberg.
During the mayoral election in Stuttgart in 2020, the tool was clicked 250,000 times. According to political scientists, election-O-Mats or candidate-O-Mats are excellent tools for mobilizing less-informed, non-political citizens. You can help increase voter turnout. However, they tend to benefit the challengers and harm the incumbents. The latter often have to explain why they reject some demands or why they don’t want to grant money for a certain project. Nevertheless, it is politically tricky when incumbents boycott the instrument because they could use it to strengthen their own position in the election campaign.