The State Youth Council has asked the Berlin CDU to agree to a lowering of the voting age for the House of Representatives election to 16 years. For this, the state constitution would have to be changed by parliament with a two-thirds majority.
The SPD, the Left and the Greens are in favor, but that’s not enough. 15 votes are missing from the ranks of the CDU parliamentary group.
“Show us that you mean your new, young image seriously – and position yourself now for voting age 16”, it says in an appeal by the state youth council, to which 34 regional children and youth associations belong. A request to the address of the Christian Democrats. Other federal states are already further.
In Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, young people aged 16 to 18 can also take part in the state elections.
Around 60,000 young people in Berlin would benefit from lowering the voting age, which is around two percent of those eligible to vote. So far, 16 to 18-year-olds have only been able to take part in the elections to the district council meetings – since 2005.
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Also for the federal election, which will take place in autumn 2021 on the same day as the House of Representatives, 52 youth associations are now calling for the “voting age 16”. To do this, the Basic Law would have to be changed during this legislative period.
At the federal level, as in Berlin, the Union parliamentary groups and the AfD are against it.
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The lowering of the voting age would be “an important signal to the young generation”, especially in these times of crisis, said the chairwoman of the Berlin State Youth Association, Ramona Hinkelmann, on whose initiative the Federal Youth Association’s general assembly passed a resolution last weekend. The voting age in Germany has been 18 for the federal election since 1970. This has not changed for 50 years.
