Fridays for Future knows how to mobilize.

Shortly before the general election, a large demo in Berlin, with Greta Thunberg leading the way, to send out the message: This election is not just about the next federal government, but about saving the world, just as activist Luisa Neubauer portrays it.

The fact that everything is at stake is, of course, with the opposite sign, the message of the Union with the warning of a turn to the left.

Pollsters claim that what catches the voters' minds can be determined up to the last second.

The Forsa Institute, which helped to determine the mood with its quick polls on the trialles on television and the posture ratings for the three top candidates, at least mentioned in its broadcast on Friday that it was not “the main task of election and opinion researchers to precisely predict the outcome of the election .

The claim of serious electoral research "is" rather to trace the course of the opinion-forming and decision-making processes of the electorate transparently and adequately ".

That is "especially important in this election campaign with the major swings in voter favor".

Red-green alliance in the network

The question to be asked at this point is what contribution the daily surveys have made to the changes. The last water level says that the SPD is still ahead with 25 percent, ahead of the Union with 22, the Greens with 17, the FDP with twelve, the AfD with ten and the Left with six percent. Nothing specific is known, so the tenor should be.

If you look at the election campaign on the Internet, the result is completely different: Here red-red-green won the battle, but with the means of brutal overpowering. The hashtag campaigns against Armin Laschet, which were arranged at Telegram and met with a great response on Twitter or TikTok, were initiated by climate activists and a few politicians from the Greens and the Left. But that did not benefit her parties and the candidate Annalena Baerbock, who is exposed to defamation from many directions, but the SPD. The Union had its hands full denying the worst slander (such as the fact that donations for flood victims had gone into Laschet's election campaign), while Olaf Scholz hovered over it.

Just as the Greens and the Union lost support due to their internal party struggles on the front stage, the backsliding actions on the net also ended: the laughing third party could be a social democrat.

This was perpetuated by television, public service more than private, through permanent personalization, just like the narrow setting of topics (climate, climate, climate).

"As always before this election, the old knowledge of electoral research applies that the political moods determined before an election do not have to match the votes on election day," Forsa wrote shortly before the election.

The irony should catch everyone's eye.