Charisma in times of crisis: How to win over the masses

A little over a year ago, E lif Eralp was still a barely visible specialist politician, largely unknown in Berlin and beyond. Now she suddenly has the best chance of becoming the first left-wing governing mayor of the federal capital.

And Ulrich Siegmund, winner of the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, was not long ago only known to proven experts on the radical right. Now the AfDler could become Saxony-Anhalt's first prime minister.

Eralp and Siegmund are fundamentally different. Left and right are not two equally problematic edges of a supposedly neutral center. The horseshoe theory is bullshit. However, Eralp's and Siegmund's successes have the same ingredient and anyone who is concerned about the future should know that.

It's called: charisma. The apostle Paul once considered it a gift from God that is given to all true believers. The word translated from ancient Greek is gift of grace. Today, in our semi-enlightened world, charisma is no longer generally considered a heavenly gift. But rather as something that can be trained to a large extent.

The Swiss economist John Antonakis, for example, says that people who appear charismatic are able to create closeness to their fellow human beings, touch them emotionally and credibly inspire them for their values ​​and visions. To do this, they used certain techniques: speaking in high-contrast images or telling personal anecdotes. He has proven this in scientific studies.

Eralp and Siegmund, they could have completed a seminar with Antonakis. When Elif Eralp wants to explain the problems on the Berlin housing market in interviews, she talks about the “single parent who was standing at the supermarket checkout with three children and whose purchases could no longer be debited because of a rent increase.”

In YouTube videos, Ulrich Siegmund likes to differentiate between those “who love Germany” and those “who hate Germany”. Or talks about how, especially in the mornings, he encountered people in German cities who spoke German poorly. “Because those who are hardworking don’t go there.”

In common usage, charisma is attributed to people individually, as if it were a personal, albeit perhaps acquired, quality. New national coach Jürgen Klopp: “What a charismatic guy!”, Taylor Swift: “Wow, how charismatic!” Such attributions are of little or no use for political analysis.

But charisma has another meaning. This in turn can very well help us to better understand the political problems of our time. And to develop solutions for it. In sociology, charisma describes a social relationship, a bond between leading actors and their followers. This understanding goes back to Max Weber. However, he understood charisma primarily as an affective power relationship of command and obedience.

The sociologist Max Lill conducted research on this. He says that charisma arises mutually and not only through irrational submission. The supporters guarantee their support to those actors of whom they are convinced and feel represented. The representation, in turn, takes up the experiences, emotions and demands of its followers, condenses them into itself, embodies them passionately in its language and gestures. And give it such public expression. This has an activating, mobilizing effect on the followers. This fuels collective effectiveness.

Elif Eralp and the Berlin Left Party were not simply elected by hundreds of thousands of Berliners. Countless volunteers knocked on a quarter of a million front doors during the election campaign. We spoke to people, including many who were politically very different, and tried to convince them of the left.

In Saxony-Anhalt, too, hundreds of thousands of people didn't just give their votes to Ulrich Siegmund and the AfD. The AfD had previously organized so-called family festivals in numerous small towns in Saxony-Anhalt. Some of their helpers have come from other federal states specifically to set up bouncy castles and spin bratwursts on the grill.

“Exemplary charisma,” is what Lill calls this relationship, based on Weber's late religious studies. The starting point for this has often been moments in history “in which outsiders revalued certain stigmas and turned them against the status quo.” In 2019, Greta Thunberg, for example, exemplified a global, desperate youth concerned about the climate. Martin Luther King was the charismatic representative of the black civil rights movement in the USA.

Today, Ulrich Siegmund stands for “the common people” in East Germany. Elif Eralp for the post-migrant, cosmopolitan and rent-living multitude of Berlin.

What becomes clear here is that which specific characteristics and actions of a person have a charismatic effect depends on their target group. Whether representation and followers ultimately come together is a question of staging, resources – and, above all, circumstances. Exemplary charisma can be cultivated particularly in times of crisis, says Lill. “If people have a fundamental dissatisfaction within them, they are more open to offers that address their fears, wishes and longings – and strike the right tone.”

The crisis is everyday life today. Anyone who wanted to find out about fundamental dissatisfaction in society before the recent elections just had to ask around in Halle-Neustadt or Berlin-Neukölln. “It can’t stay the way it is!” – AfD voters formulated this primarily in terms of migration and economic policy. And voters of the Left Party, especially with a view to skyrocketing rents and social cuts.

Fundamental dissatisfaction: The feeling is an expression of failed politics of the “centre”. And that in several senses. When it comes to economic and, above all, migration policy, the self-declared center parties have maneuvered themselves into a dead end. For a long time they - especially the Union, in the hope of stealing votes from the right-wing extremists - have paid for a negative mood that is now their downfall: the solutions they offer to the problems they helped to create can no longer permanently change the bad feeling associated with them. Controversial border controls, CEAS reform, all of this no longer helps against the new German culture of non-welcoming.

In terms of rent and social policy, the middle is in an ideological dead end. If it wanted to contain the dissatisfaction that is seeping ever deeper into society in the face of rising living costs and shrinking opportunities for advancement, it would have to break with its neoliberal program. Your promise that if you cut a little now you would make the welfare state future-proof is becoming less and less effective.

However, more and more suction creates a credibly conveyed atmosphere of optimism. The antidote to paralyzing fear of the future. “From today on we are changing our Berlin and making it a better place – all together!” Elif Eralp shouted into the microphone during her first address to her supporters on election evening. In Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund repeatedly announced before the election: “We are writing history.” His party gave itself a fitting new motto: “Everything is possible.”

In radical offers, says Lill, "a promise of a substantially better life can be felt. Whether as an illusion or a real perspective." This can have a charismatic effect on people and have a magnetic effect on them. Feelings of powerlessness or alienation that previously plagued them could then transform into a belief that everything could be completely different. And that they can take part in it, yes, write history.

In the 1930s, the Nazis formed as a charismatic mass project with Adolf Hitler at the helm who promised salvation. By 1945 they murdered millions of people. Today, the AfD, a new national revolutionary and partly fascist movement, is on the rise. In order to stop them, journalist Carolin Amlinger recently said in a taz interview, a social renewal of democracy is needed: expansion of the welfare state and public infrastructure, better opportunities for everyone, financed primarily through higher taxes for the highest incomes, inheritances and assets.

These are a few of the essential ingredients for a radically progressive future project. The Left Party in Berlin has impressively demonstrated how charismatic majorities can be mobilized for this purpose. The days that followed reveal that challenges await, both internal and external. Defy resistance, learn from criticism. And then: deliver.