WHP: How did the idea for Wahl-Kompass come about? What motivated you to create the platform?
Nina Harz: It happened rather spontaneously, shortly before Berlin’s September 2026 election. I wanted to understand the parties’ programs better, so I made a table for myself comparing the issues that matter to me. I shared it with my friends, and Masha (Maria Waldenberg, technical co-founder) suggested that we make a website for it, so we published it and used AI to translate the content.
WHP: How does Wahl-Kompass work?
Nina Harz: It’s one big table for the Berlin election. Across the top are the 10 parties, and you choose which ones to put side by side. Down the side are 65 topics, from transport and housing to climate, security, education, health and migration. You can open the topics you’re interested in and see, in your own language, where each party stands in one sentence.
Next to every summary is the original German quote. Clicking on it takes you to the exact spot in the party’s program. If you notice a mistake, highlight the text and leave a short comment. It will land in our inbox, and we’ll fix it.
WHP: How did you select the 65 points of comparison?
Nina Harz: I read through all the programs to see which topics appear most often. Most parties cover the same core areas in a different order: transport, housing, climate, education, safety. I tried to keep the content as neutral and unbiased as I could, so the topics are more or less randomly ordered.
WHP: What makes your approach different from tools such as Wahl-O-Mat?
Nina Harz: Wahl-O-Mat is a great tool for getting an initial orientation in the political landscape. It uses an agree/disagree format: you can answer 30–40 questions in a few minutes and get a sense of which party is closest to your views. For many people, this is enough to make a choice.
Others need more: one could care a lot about one specific issue that Wahl-O-Mat doesn’t address, or a topic might not fit into the agree/disagree format. Yes, we all agree that Berlin should be cleaner. But do we want to improve it through fines or by financing more clean-up initiatives? Wahl-O-Mat doesn’t always give detailed answers, and to see exact policy implementation, you need different tools.
Programs are also full of rhetoric. They might sound great, but if I want to see where each party stands on, let’s say, green hydrogen, or compare the number of apartments each party wants to build, or see exactly how they want to restructure BSR, I need to do a lot of scrolling through the program texts. By the time I am done with the first couple of parties, I have already forgotten the details, so it’s much simpler to have everything side by side in one place.
WHP: The platform is available in eleven languages. Why was multilingual accessibility such an important part of the project?
Nina Harz: Political parties only publish their programs in German. As far as I know, only Volt offered its full program in English. The Greens published a version in “Leichte Sprache,” which created oversimplifications and left out the very details many of us read party programs for. For people who read fluently in other languages and need the full content in a language they know well, simplified German isn’t the answer. That’s a different need which I am trying to meet.
WHP: Who are you hoping to reach?
Nina Harz: My priority is reaching Berlin’s immigrant communities, especially those who do not speak German fluently. Of course, German speakers are also welcome to use our website. I imagine it can be handy to have a side-by-side comparison. But there is already so much political content in German, so right now, I’m focused on filling the existing gap in other languages.
WHP: You mentioned that you’d like to follow up on the parties’ election promises over the next five years. What are your plans, and what would you like to achieve with the project in the longer term?
Nina Harz: People are still using the website after the election, so the momentum isn’t over. The next step is the coalition agreement. When it comes, we plan to incorporate the results into the comparison table. Stay tuned!
When I shared the website more widely, people said that it would help them choose better if they knew which promises actually get implemented, and what the consistency and follow-through rates are for each party. Assessing this is a challenge because each coalition is different. We have been thinking about building a promise tracker, but we would like to have more cooperation partners with greater political expertise on board before we get started on this. Right now we are exploring the possibilities and working out the methodology.
We are open to collaborating with other German Bundesländer if they would like similar translated summaries made for them. We could create one for federal elections in the future.
WHP: Many Berliners are affected by political decisions but cannot vote in elections because they don’t have German citizenship. Can Wahl-Kompass also be useful for them? What role can access to political information play in encouraging participation beyond voting?
Nina Harz: People can use a comparison like this to decide where to volunteer or which initiative to support, to prepare for naturalization, or to talk with friends and family who can vote.
Most of what we see of politics comes through posters and social media, which offer slogans and general statements. The concrete proposals are in the programs, and having them in a language you know well is the first step. EU citizens can already vote in district elections, and some parties have proposed extending voting rights to long-term residents.
WHP: Looking at the bigger picture, what do you think Berlin could do better to make political information and democratic participation more accessible to its international residents?
Nina Harz: There’s a lot of good basic material for newcomers: how to vote, how the system works. Our project is a part of that. What’s missing is the next step — the actual political debate. And “just learn German” isn’t always the answer. Much of German political content assumes a lot of shared knowledge.
Someone who grew up here may remember what a certain politician said in 2002; someone who arrived twenty years later won’t, even with a C2 certificate. Political shows are full of references like that: jokes, history, legal assumptions that nobody explains because everyone is supposed to know them. Each one is small and may not seem worth explaining, but they accumulate and make it harder to understand the broader context.
I’d love to see more discussions, events and programs where newcomers and people who grew up here sit together, ideally with Germans with a migration background, who know both worlds and can provide the missing context. It’s about not assuming prior knowledge, meeting newcomers where they are, and listening to their questions, which also differ between communities. Things like that are rare, but taking part in them is exactly what encouraged me to start this project.
| About the creators: Nina Harz has over ten years of experience in communications, content creation and project coordination at international tech startups. She currently writes about environmental and urban policy for Eco Berlin and advocates for political participation in Berlin. Masha Waldenberg has extensive experience in project management and developing web and mobile applications for citizen science and environmental data. She is responsible for the technical development of Kompass Kollektive, focusing on making digital civic participation more accessible. |
(Header image: © Sasun Bughdaryan | Unsplash)
