Germany’s president Frank-Walter Steinmeier during a recent interview spoke out in favor of lowering the eligible voting age from 18 to 16 years old, a move that would greatly benefit left-liberal parties like his own, the SPD, as well as the Greens, both of which enjoy broad support among the country’s younger demographic.
In the interview, published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Tuesday, May 16th, the German president also voiced his support for plans to increase the legislative period from four to five years.
“I can appreciate the idea of giving the Bundestag more time for legislative substantive work. Especially in a time of overlapping crises,” the president said.
In light of Germany’s massive “demographic shifts,” in which the proportion of the votes held by older people is increasing considerably, Steinmeier believes it is “not only necessary but advisable, to think about whether we can compensate for the weight of younger people by lowering the voting age to 16 in federal elections.” He added that this is already the law for local and state elections in some federal states.
For example, in 1996, Lower Saxony became the first federal state to permit 16-year-olds to vote in local elections. Between then and 2021, six other federal states—Hamburg, Bremen, Brandenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Baden-Württemberg, and North-Rhine Westphalia—adopted the same law. Presently, nine federal states permit 16-year-olds to vote in elections at the local level.
Germany’s globalist, liberal-left parties have long pushed to reduce the voting age at the federal level in order to expand their voter base, a goal for which pro-mass migration policies have been implemented. Research data from various countries across the Western world have consistently shown that a considerable majority of young people are socially and politically progressive, making them more likely to vote for liberal parties.
Furthermore, increasingly large segments of the under-18 demographic across Western Europe are either foreign-born or second-generation immigrants and in most cases, they throw their political support behind pro-migration left-wing parties.
Germany’s right-of-center parties, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), for their part, oppose the plan to lower the voting age.
Thorsten Frei (CDU), the deputy chairman of the party’s parliamentary group, has insisted that lowering the voting age at the federal level would ultimately work to “devalue the right to vote.”
Interestingly, news of the German president’s statements comes just days after Keir Starmer, the leader of United Kingdom’s Labor Party, confirmed that his party was “looking at” lowering the voting age to 16, as it too seeks to expand its pool of voters. Additionally, Starmer voiced his party’s intention to explore the possibility of allowing EU citizens who are residents of the UK the right to vote in the country’s general elections, as The European Conservative previously reported.
