Foreign-Born Mayors Are a Sign of Change in Germany

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Much is written about xenophobia in Germany’s post-communist east. Last weekend, though, two important cities in the region elected foreigners as mayors. One of them doesn’t even have a German passport.

Voters appear to be tired of politics as usual, but this fatigue hasn’t necessarily played into the hands of populist and nationalist forces such as the Alternative for Germany party. Rather, the realignment favors those with new ideas and unorthodox profiles. Being environmentally conscious helps, too. 

Rostock, population 228,000, is the biggest city of the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. It’s a sizable Baltic Sea port with heavy traffic to and from the Nordic countries. Some 91 percent of the city’s residents were born in Germany, a high proportion typical of the country’s east. But its newly elected mayor, Claus Ruhe Madsen, is a Danish citizen. He has lived in Germany since 1992, most of that time in the city.

In the European Union, with its free movement of people, citizens can vote and run in local elections wherever they are resident in the bloc. But Madsen is the first mayor of a major German city not to hold a passport issued by that country.

He isn’t a member of any party, either – although Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the pro-business Free Democrats helped him by not running their own candidates.

Madsen’s election manifesto, though, was unabashedly green. It included, among other things, pledges to cut the use of disposable plastic at city events, to make the municipal bureaucracy as paper-free as possible, and to electrify more of the city’s public transportation system. Along with some business-friendly proposals, he also offered support to the city’s Muslim community.

Goerlitz, in Saxony, is famous for its historic center, where scenes from Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” were filmed. The city is bisected by the Polish border, making it important to relations between the two countries. It nearly elected Germany’s first AfD mayor. Late last month, the party’s Sebastian Wippel came top in the preliminary round of voting. That caused nationwide alarm and prompted a group of Hollywood stars to write a letter to voters, urging them to change their minds.

In the end, Wippel lost to the CDU candidate, Octavian Ursu. If his name doesn’t sound German, that’s because he was born in Bucharest, Romania. The classically trained trumpeter played in the local symphony orchestra after he moved to Germany in 1990 and remained engaged in cultural issues after entering local politics 10 years ago. The Orthodox Christian – a rare bird in these parts – ran on a business-friendly platform, proposing to cut local taxes. He won 55 percent of the vote in the run-off as voters issued a clear rebuke to the AfD. (It will still become the biggest group in the city council, although that isn’t out of the ordinary in Saxony, where the party is the strongest or second strongest, according to opinion polls.)

Both Madsen’s and Ursu’s victories may look like flukes, but they really aren’t. German politics are defined not so much by the decline of the umbrella parties – the CDU and the Social Democrats, which have run the country since World War II – as by a smoldering irritation with traditional politics and the same old faces. The two parties have failed to understand the ways in which the country is changing.

One such change is Germany’s increased openness to the rest of Europe and the world, to which demographic statistics don’t quite do justice. People like Madsen and Ursu have earned respect and a high standing in a society that is one of the toughest in Europe to integrate into – not just because of the difficult language with its many dialects, but also because community life is often opaque and politely unwelcoming to foreigners. The AfD’s recent rise is as much a reaction to this increased openness as Madsen’s and Ursu’s success.

But the national agenda is changing in other ways, too. The umbrella parties have slept through the shift toward environmental awareness. As the effects of climate change manifest themselves more clearly in Germany with more extreme weather, voters want politicians to be knowledgeable and sincere about the threat. In more and more opinion polls, the Greens are the country’s strongest party.

The German political system has a hard time adapting to the simultaneous shifts in what voters demand of it. What’s happening in local and regional elections is a foretaste of what may be to come on the national level. The traditional parties don’t have much time to start recovering lost ground; the kind of upheaval that destroyed the old center-right and center-left in France is entirely possible in Germany, too.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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