Less than four years ago, Erik von Malottki’s main objective was to keep the party he loved as far away from political power as possible. Inspired by young activist grassroots movements in the US and the UK, the trade unionist was one of a band of young Social Democratic Party (SPD) members who in January 2018 urged delegates to vote against joining another coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
Yet this week, the now 35-year-old and a band of similarly aged delegates propelled the German centre-left to an unlikely election victory. While the British Labour party remains entrenched in factionalism, the SPD has constructively channelled the energy of its youthful rebels, edging ahead in Sunday’s vote through a seismic shift in the country’s north-east.
The victory was narrow, with the SPD pulling ahead of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of the outgoing chancellor Merkel by only 1.6 percentage points. Whether its leader, Olaf Scholz, will also become Germany’s next chancellor depends on complicated coalition talks over the coming weeks.
But in the two northernmost states of the formerly socialist east, the SPD’s triumph was comprehensive: in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the party won a direct mandate in every single one of the 16 constituencies, all bar one of which were previously held by the CDU.
Its most symbolic victory came in the electoral district of Vorpommern-Rügen – Vorpommern-Greifswald I, where Anna Kassautzki, who was born in 1993, won a direct mandate held since 1990 by none other than Merkel.
At simultaneous state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Social Democrats emerged victorious with nearly 40% of the vote, a nine-percentage-point swing on 2016.
A deeper look into the electoral history of the region shows how remarkable the turnaround was. While Mecklenburg, the state’s western region, has a history of tilting left, Vorpommern on the Baltic Sea used to be a conservative stronghold – partly a result of the CDU being able to inherit party structures built by its socialist East German counterpart after the fall of the Berlin Wall (the SPD, by contrast, was banned under the socialist regime).
In Erik von Malottki’s constituency, Mecklenburgische Seenplatte I – Vorpommern-Greifswald II, the fight for first place used to be between the CDU and the far-left Die Linke. This year, the expectation was for a tight race between the CDU and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
“No one expected us to win here when we picked our candidates a year ago,” said Patrick Dahlemann, a 33-year-old delegate in the regional state parliament and one of the architects of the SPD’s regional revival. “To be honest, it wasn’t something we would have even dared dream of three weeks ago.” Yet in the early hours of Monday morning, Von Malottki swooped into the top spot from fourth place, 796 votes ahead of the AfD candidate.
Much of the SPD’s popularity here is due to the party’s national campaign. The centre left’s promise to raise the minimum wage to €12 an hour (£10.25) has been dismissed as tokenism by its opponents, but in the structurally weaker regions of the north-east and the Ruhr valley, it made voters listen: 60% of workers in Von Malottki’s constituency are on low wages. “For people here, the new minimum wage would be an absolute gamechanger,” he said.
Delivered by the monosyllabic northerner Olaf Scholz, a more familiar figure in the Baltic flatlands than the jovial Rhinelander Armin Laschet, the promise had credibility. Had the anti-coalition campaigners succeeded in pushing the SPD into opposition in 2018, it probably would have had less. “Scholz would never have ever been such a carthorse for us if he hadn’t been finance minister for the last four years,” said Dahlemann.
Yet neither would Scholz’s promises have been championed with the same energy at a local level if it hadn’t been for the Social Democrats’ youthful rebels. After failing to stop their party from joining another “grand coalition”, they claimed a totemic victory in November 2019, when Scholz lost out on the party leadership to the leftwingers Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans.
What seemed at the time like an upset created an equilibrium that made it possible for young members such as Von Malottki to throw their weight behind Scholz’s candidacy: “We knew they would have a seat at the table when it comes to coalition talks.” On the ground, the younger candidates lent a touch of populist aggression to Scholz’s statesman-like appeal.
Infrastructure problems in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are plain for everyone to see: trains cut through the region intermittently, and ticket halls at smaller rail stops have been derelict for decades. , Despite local campaigns, the Karnin lift bridge across the Peenestrom estuary has lain moribund since it was destroyed by the Nazis in an attempt to halt the Red Army’s advance in 1945.
The SPD’s young candidates wasted no time pinning the blame on the federal transport ministry, run by the Bavarian CSU since 2009. “In Bavaria, they build motorways without end,” Von Malottki said. His party has pledged to set up a demand-responsive bus network in regions cut off from public transport lines.
Embroiled in numerous corruption scandals during the pandemic, Merkel’s conservatives have done their bit to impersonate a party drunk on political power: the prodigal rise of the 28-year-old local CDU candidate Philipp Amthor was halted last year over his lobbying on behalf of an American IT company.
The SPD identified a chink in the Christian Democrats’ armour. Von Malottki signed a pledge to donate any extra income to charity. On his Twitter and Instagram channels, he started using the hashtag #unbribable. Precisely because his odds of winning looked so low, he said, voters believed him.
“None of us decided to stand as a candidate because we had our eyes on a career,” said Von Malottki, whose father is a forester and whose mother works at post-reunification agency tasked with opening up Stasi files to the public. “We’re all idealists. I was expecting to lose, so I wanted to at least run a campaign that people would remember me by.”
The SPD may have painted the north-east red, but its victory remains fragile. In several constituencies, the AfD came in at a close-run second place – in some, it increased its share of the vote.
The centre-left won the fight by taking on the AfD over material questions such as wages but it has barely taken the fight to the far right on cultural questions, such as over immigration or gender politics. Should it fail to act out its ideals in government, the north-east could eventually be awash in the bright blue colours of the populist right.
“We’ve only just recovered from the Schröder years,” Von Malottki said. “If we don’t deliver on our promises, all our gains will be gone again in four years.”
