Campaign before the state elections in MV: With chocolate, vanilla and colorful sprinkles

In Sarow and Demmin, in Pasewalk and Papendorf, democracy tastes like vanilla this summer. Or chocolate. There is also iced coffee. And colorful sprinkles. All of this comes from a blue bus with ice melting from the roof - painted of course.

Soft ice cream, more precisely. The ice bus Gabi is touring through Western Pomerania this summer, and if the financing works out, even beyond the summer. The ice cream is available on a donation basis, you pay what you can. Gabi is not interested in making money at all. “We want to spread a good mood,” says Wibke Seifarth, one of the operators. “It’s about creating meeting spaces and starting conversations.” Hence the motto: “Ice cream to meet you”. The ice cream is just a means to an end - and exactly the right thing for the hot summer days.

It is no coincidence that Gabi is currently touring the small towns before the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on September 20th. The idea came from Julia Sachs from the “Moving Together” network, an “alliance for a solidarity-based and just Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,” as it says on its website. Seifarth, who knows Sachs from other contexts, contributed the ice cream machine. Then other women from Western Pomerania came along.

Seifarth knows how to create meeting spaces. She is a freelance educator and moderator for youth participation, lives in Gatschow and runs the “Landkombinat” association there with an open workshop, a repair café and regular educational offers. In a telephone conversation with taz, she tells how she once traveled through Demmin with a sofa to places where young people were in order to talk to them and make their ideas visible: What is going through their minds, what activities and facilities do they want?

In the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a right-wing extremist party could come into government for the first time since 1945. But there is also a lively civil society on site that has not yet given up losing the elections. In the “Really Good People” series we will be introducing them throughout the summer.

Gabi works in a similar way. There are “Klön-Schnack tablecloths” on the tables with questions on them. “What moves you?”, for example. It's about people exchanging ideas, feeling seen and heard and starting to think about their wishes and ideas. And: It is particularly important for young people to come across people with different ideas who embody cosmopolitanism and open up new horizons, says Seifarth.

Gabi has two to three assignments per week. Before moving to a new location, the creators contact local associations, activists and politicians. Like at the beginning of July. Then Seifarth drove to Sarov with Gabi. She called the mayor first. Thomas Wellenbeck was very impressed by the idea, advertised the campaign and then came to eat ice cream himself. Not all mayors are so open-minded, says Seifarth. Some did not respond to inquiries at all or declined to participate.

The ice cream mobile is well received, says Seifarth. She is happy about that, but it is also an expression of a symptom: “I think we are fixing something that has been neglected in recent years.” Everyday places where people meet have increasingly disappeared. This is also due to a lack of political support. In order to bring these so-called third places back to the small towns in Western Pomerania, it takes more than an afternoon of soft ice cream. “There needs to be a bigger strategy.”

Before the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, we are introducing committed people from civil society. All texts can be found here.