harry potter - Why didn't Voldemort use the Ministry to rise to power and instead chose to become a criminal?

There are often parallels between Hitler and Voldemort, but one thing that is missing is that Hitler came to power "the official way" - via elections.

Why didn't Voldemort do the same?

Here’s a quote from Dumbledore (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, chapter 20):

He reached the seventh year of his schooling with, as you might have expected, top grades in every examination he had taken. All around him, his classmates were deciding which jobs they were to pursue once they had left Hogwarts. Nearly everybody expected spectacular things from Tom Riddle, prefect, Head Boy, winner of the Award for Special Services to the School. I know that several teachers, Professor Slughorn amongst them, suggested that he join the Ministry of Magic, offered to set up appointments, put him in touch with useful contacts. He refused all offers. The next thing the staff knew, Voldemort was working at Borgin and Burkes.

With his skills, intelligence, and perfect reputation, at that point he would have had very good chances of succeeding in becoming Minister of Magic in the next 10-15 years or more.

Answer

Tom Riddle wanted to bury his past. He couldn't do that in politics.

Riddle is a pure-blood supremacist, and hates his family:

• He detests the Muggle family who gave him his name (and later tracks them down and kills them)


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  He detects the magical mother who died giving birth to him, decrying her as weak:

  
  

  
  

  “My mother can’t have been magic, or she wouldn’t have died,” said Riddle, more to himself than Dumbledore.

  
  

  
  



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  He detests his (apparently good-for-nothing) Gaunt ancestors, who are a pack of violent and petty criminals.

  
  

If he’d acquired power through the Ministry, it would have been hard to shake his old name. He’d be stuck with a reminder of his Muggle parentage, his inferior blood status, and unsatisfying family. Even if he changed his name, there would still be a fairly direct line between Tom Riddle the Hogwarts student and the successful politician.

Acquiring power by underground means lets him shed the trappings of his family. He can re-emerge with a new identity, and nobody will remember the half-blood with a Muggle’s name. And as Dumbledore explains in Harry’s second year, it was very successful:

“Very few people know that Lord Voldemort was once called Tom Riddle.”

I don’t think Voldemort was opposed to the idea of becoming a politician. He was opposed to what it would drag along with him.