Older people have other priorities than younger ones which often don't earn or not that much money. For pensioners, it's the only way to influence the security of theirs pensions. Employed people can look for a new job if they think it's going downhill at their company.
During this election, you could choose between:
- CDU/CSU: If there weren't the euro crisis, I am unsure you would have noticed them governing. In general, that's neither good or bad, but for me because I think there need to be reforms, it's bad. They are pro-security, pro-surveillance, pro big energy corporations (who has to pay for not-constructed powerlines which a private should have build? The tax payer).
- SPD: Made important reforms when they governed ~2000, but have not much to offer today except minimum wage and equal page for core and rented workers.
- FDP: Fooled theirs voters 4 ago (huge posters claiming that a nurse will have X euro more in her pocket etc.), wanted to privatize many things and let everybody pay the same amount (without wage recalibration), lowered the tax for hotels after officially receiving money from the owners of a hotel group, voted against action in Lybia (abstaining would have been okay). The party for high earners and also some office people working for the government. Some younger MPs and ministers, but their frontrunner this time was a dinosaur.
- Greens: Like the FDP a party for the better earning people, but with a conscience. Didn't talk much about their usual topics like ecology, energy, animals, civil rights, but about increasing taxes - theirs voters didn't like that. Also there are some factions in the party.
- Left: Second-strongest force in the east where they are the successors of the GDR party SED, are still unable to say that shooting people at the inner-German border was wrong, every Anti-American is welcome, are against anything which has to be done and promise everything. In the West, they are more extrem and have many disgruntled former SPD members.
- AfD: Against increased money transfers in the European Union, else mostly lacking a program.
- NPD: Nazis. Got <1% in the west and 3-4% in the East (at least where I checked).
I can't find a party which makes totally happy. Can you? But that's politics. It's not fun. Also the youth will come to terms with it. The old politicians gain more influence the more the young voters abstain.
Forcing votes would only help the extreme, and voting is not for protesting but for finding the party which matches best with one's needs and also not-self-centered goals.