Lls more than four years ago, Erik von Malottki’s main concern was to keep the party he loved as far away from political power as possible. Inspired by fledgling grassroots activist movements in the US and UK, the trade unionist was among a group of young members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who in January 2018 urged delegates to vote against joining another coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats.
But this week, the now 35-year-old and a crowd of delegates of similar age propelled the German center-left party to an unlikely election victory. While Britain’s Labor Party remains rooted in factionalism, the SPD constructively channeled the energy of its youthful rebels and prevailed in Sunday’s vote by a seismic shift in the country’s north-east.
The victory was narrow, with the SPD only 1.6 percentage points ahead of outgoing Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Whether its chairman Olaf Scholz will also become Germany’s next chancellor depends on complicated coalition negotiations in the coming weeks.
But in the two northernmost federal states of the former socialist East, the triumph of the SPD was comprehensive: In Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the party won a direct mandate in each of the 16 constituencies, all but one of which had previously been occupied by the SPD CDU.
She won the most symbolic victory in the Vorpommern-Rügen – Vorpommern-Greifswald I constituency, where Anna Kassautzki, born in 1993, won a direct mandate that has been held by none other than Merkel since 1990.
In the state elections held at the same time in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the Social Democrats emerged victorious with almost 40% of the votes, an increase of nine percentage points compared to 2016.
A closer look at the electoral history of the region shows how remarkable the turnaround was. While Mecklenburg, the country’s western region, has a history of swinging left, Western Pomerania on the Baltic Sea used to be a conservative stronghold – partly because the CDU was able to inherit party structures built by its socialist East German counterpart after the fall of the Berlin Wall (the SPD however, was banned under the socialist regime).
In Erik von Malottki’s Mecklenburgische Seenplatte I – Vorpommern-Greifswald II constituency, the fight for first place used to be fought between the CDU and the extreme left. A close race between the CDU and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was expected this year.
“No one expected us to win here when we selected our candidates a year ago,” said Patrick Dahlemann, 33, a member of the state parliament and one of the architects of the SPD state renewal. “To be honest, we wouldn’t have even dared to dream of that three weeks ago.” But in the early hours of Monday morning, von Malottki fell from fourth place to the top position, 796 votes ahead of the AfD candidate.
Much of the SPD’s popularity here is due to the party’s national election campaign. The center-left’s promise to raise the minimum wage to €12 an hour was dismissed as an alibi by opponents, but in the structurally weaker regions of the north-east and the Ruhr area it got voters to sit up and take notice: 60% of workers in Malottki’s constituency earn low wages. “For the people here, the new minimum wage would be an absolute game changer,” he said.
Presented by the monosyllabic northerner Olaf Scholz, who is better known in the Baltic lowlands than the jovial Rhinelander Armin Laschet, the promise had credibility. If the coalition opponents had succeeded in pushing the SPD into opposition in 2018, they would probably have had less. “Scholz would never have been such a driving force for us if he hadn’t been finance minister for four years,” said Dahlemann.
But even at the municipal level, Scholz’s promises would not have been defended with the same energy if it had not been for the youthful rebels of the Social Democrats. After failing to prevent their party from joining another “grand coalition,” they won a totemic victory in November 2019 when Scholz lost the party leadership to leftists Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans.
What looked like a surprise at the time created a balance that enabled young MPs like von Malottki to campaign for Scholz’s candidacy: “We knew that they would sit at the table in the coalition talks.” The younger candidates lent on the spot a touch of populist aggression to Scholz’s statesmanlike appeal.
Infrastructure problems in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania are visible to everyone: trains occasionally cross the region, ticket halls at smaller stations have been derelict for decades. , The Karnin Lift Bridge over the Peenestrom Estuary has fallen into disrepair despite local campaigning since it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1945 to stem the advance of the Red Army.
The young SPD candidates quickly blamed the Federal Ministry of Transport, which has been run by the Bavarian CSU since 2009. “In Bavaria, motorways are being built without end,” said von Malottki. His party has committed to building a needs-based bus network in regions cut off from local public transport.
Embraced in numerous corruption scandals during the pandemic, Merkel’s conservatives have played their part in posing as a power-drunk party: the lavish rise of 28-year-old local CDU candidate Philipp Amthor was halted last year over his lobbying on behalf of an American IT Company.
The SPD has identified a weakness in the armor of the Christian Democrats. Von Malottki signed a pledge to donate additional income to charity. On his Twitter and Instagram channels, he started using the hashtag #incorruptible. Precisely because his odds of winning looked so slim, voters believed him, he said.
“None of us decided to run because we had careers in mind,” said von Malottki, whose father is a forester and whose mother works in a post-reunification agency tasked with making Stasi files available to the public. “We are all idealists. I was expecting to lose, so at least I wanted to start a campaign where people would remember me.”
The SPD may have painted the Northeast red, but their victory remains fragile. In several constituencies, the AfD took second place – in some it was able to increase its share of the vote.
The centre-left party has won the battle by taking on the AfD on substantive issues such as wages, but has barely taken the battle to the right on cultural issues such as immigration or gender politics. Should she fail to implement her ideals in government, the Northeast could eventually be awash in the bright blue colors of the populist right.
“We have only just recovered from the Schröder years,” said von Malottki. “If we don’t keep our promises, all our achievements will be gone in four years.”
