PETRA KÖPPING HELPED INTEGRATE MIGRANTS INTO GERMAN SOCIETY.
BUT THEN SHE MET THE ANGRY VOTERS REBELLING AGAINST HER WORK. NOW SHE IS WORKING TO INTEGRATE GERMANS INTO THEIR HOMELAND.
Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables” — and lost her bid to be president of the United States. In Germany, an integration minister has now found a promising way to calm angry voters: She simply listens to them and offers understanding.
As minister for gender equality and integration in the East German state of Saxony, Petra Köpping was involved with the integration of migrants into German society. Germany took in one million refugees in 2015 — a step that has received worldwide attention. But then she made the acquaintance of angry voters rebelling against her work. Now Köpping is working to integrate Germans into their homeland.
The social-democratic politician originally from East Germany is having more and more encounters with people who do not feel comfortable in the reunified Germany, even nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Köpping has realized what they want: to be recognized.
The 60-year-old politician has found the key to tackle a political problem that endangers the democracies of the Western world. Citizens tell her they feel neglected by the established parties and lose their hopes in politics. The biggest political challenge of the coming years is finding a new, more fruitful dialogue with these dispossessed voters, whose counterparts in North America helped elect Donald Trump in the U.S. and Doug Ford in Canada and who voted for Brexit in the United Kingdom.
In Germany, those “Wutbürger” (rage citizens) made the Alternative for Germany (AfD) the most successful right-wing party since Hitler’s Nazi Party, which gained power in 1933. In the general elections of 2017, the AfD celebrated eruptive success, especially in the eastern federal states. In surveys, the AfD has now overtaken the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU), the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the eastern part of the Federal Republic. In that region, feelings of discontent find their roots in unmet hopes in reunification, Köpping says.
She knows such stories well. In 2014, she was appointed minister of integration — just in time for the influx of one million refugees from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa. When Köpping helped these refugees find their way into jobs and neighbourhoods, East Germans complained. “Integrate us first,” they told her. Köpping decided to talk to them.
Her meetings with such concerned citizens made the politician a kind of therapist. She says 65-year-old men cried as they talked about the years of economic change, unemployment, loss of status and hope they had endured. “They tell me that they vote for the AfD because the other parties need a lesson,” Köpping says.
The anger about immigration, the concern about cultural identity and the fear of a downfall of the entire West has become an outlet for long-suppressed discontent. Köpping is the first politician who does not dismiss the complainers as whining Easterners longing for the old times in the Soviet satellite state. She says she recognized that the individual consequences of reunification were in part rough and tragic.
Like Lothar Köppe’s experiences, which are typical of a whole generation of Eastern German men. The former gas engineer is retired today in a small town. Köppe is in his early 60s and says he feels misunderstood. Everyone is constantly talking about the plight of the refugees, which annoys him, he says. Nobody ever asked him how he was doing, he says. As a young man he helped build the gas pipeline between the Soviet Union and the GDR; it was a good job, he says. Then came uncertainty; he repeatedly found himself unemployed, which continues to this day. Then the refugees arrived. They “get everything and only cause problems.” That makes him angry.
This kind of anger was ignored for a long time. Sixty per cent of East Germans think they are in a worse position than the citizens of West Germany. Only 40 per cent trust the federal government, a survey in the eastern federal state of Saxony revealed in 2016. According to it, only half are satisfied with the functioning of democracy. Many feel like secondclass citizens. They are afraid to lose what they have built up since reunification — or to share it with strangers.
One of them is Jürgen Mühlberg. The retired civil engineer fears that his grandchildren can no longer live safely in their own country. He had written many letters to the local newspaper of his small Saxon town. When they were not published, Mühlberg went to a demonstration of the AfD — and read the letters there aloud. Mühlberg has been fighting with the government’s politics since Merkel opened Germany’s doors to the refugees who were stranded in Hungary in September 2015. For him, like for many former supporters of Merkel, this was a step too far. He says the upheaval at the end of the GDR had shown him that the responsible citizens must rebel against elites and “opinion dictatorship.”
Köpping says that the early 1990s in the eastern part of Germany were, indeed, a golden time of opportunity for those who had contacts and resources. For the others, including her, it was a dramatic time of decline, she says. When the Wall came down in 1989, Köpping’s time as mayor of a small town near the city of Leipzig was over. “Much trust in democracy and politics was destroyed in that time,” she says. Köpping, a mother of three, spent the years when hundreds of thousands of public-owned companies were privatized as a commercial agent. Then her hometown wanted her back at city government — and her career as a politician began again.
This politician is now in high demand on talk shows. Whenever people ask why the parties in the East are so bad, why Merkel, who was born in East Germany, is becoming increasingly unpopular in her homeland, Köpping says she believes she has the answer — a solution that is quite simple: She just wants to listen. So she gives the disenchanted the recognition they feel they lack.
Köpping is practising a new political style. Merkel always stressed the bright side of the upheaval from the grey dictatorship — but she is losing support. Merkel’s interior minister, the Bavarian Horst Seehofer, tried to appease concerned audiences by using AfD language. He called immigration the “mother of all problems” — but his party lost ground in Bavaria and he now is about to resign.
Meanwhile, the social democrat Köpping is showing how disaffected Germans can be turned into supportive voters. The matter is urgent, because studies show that the disaffected continue to the next generation. Which means Köpping has a lot of work to do.