We have submitted our nomination for the state election in Hesse on October 8 completely and on time, including a sufficient number of supporting signatures. This means we are practically certain to be on the ballot in the state election in Hesse. We are now collecting donations for our election campaign so that we can put up election posters in all larger cities in Hesse. Putting up posters already starts in Kassel on August 8.
Fundraising campaign for election posters for the state election in Hesse.
Unfortunately, we are not on the ballot in the 2023 Bavarian state election this time, as we did not manage to submit a sufficient number of verified supporting signatures by the deadline of July 27, 2023.
In the last state election in Bavaria in 2018, we could be elected in 4 of 7 electoral districts. This time we wanted to run at least in Middle Franconia. However, one of our main collectors was temporarily unable to collect because of an accident, and there were not enough other collectors, so we only gathered a few hundred supporting signatures for Middle Franconia. We would have needed 1,275, which corresponds to 0.1% of the voters.
One difficulty in collecting is that many people do not want to sign right away and first want to look at it again at home in peace. Almost everyone likes our topic, but most have never heard of our party before. Some also generally do not want to give out their data. If you have to approach 10 people to get one signature, you have to approach 1% of all eligible voters. People often have a few questions in return, and you then talk for a while. If you then need about 30 minutes per signature on average, that is over 600 hours of work. Since older people also generally do not give out their data, no matter how good they think the cause is, you can really only collect reasonably well among people under 30. However, people under 30 make up only a relatively small share of voters, which makes collecting even more difficult. On top of that, each eligible voter may sign for only one party. Overall, the hurdle for being allowed to run as a small party in Bavaria is therefore considerably higher than in all other federal states. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, as few as 30 supporting signatures are needed for the admission of the state list, and no more parties run there than in other federal states (after all, one main argument for the supporting signatures is that the ballot would otherwise become too long).