Runoff elections in Lower Saxony: Mini steps to the feminist revolution

Lower Saxony is still a long way from the feminist revolution. But the runoff elections at least indicate that progress is being made, albeit in small steps. After this year's direct elections, one in four of Lower Saxony's 36 district administrator positions will be held by a woman. Previously it had only been around 14 percent.

This may have been due to the official bonus in the Osnabrück and Lüchow-Dannenberg districts, as only Anna Kebschull and Dagmar Schulz were up for re-election. In Schaumburg, Peine, in the Heidekreis, in Göttingen, Bentheim and Nienburg and in the Hanover region, where the job is known as Region President, the winners are the first woman to hold the position.

This is relevant. Elections at city, district and municipal level are always particularly strongly influenced by personality. This was recently confirmed by the Lower Saxony Panel, a cross-university research project that examines how people in Lower Saxony make decisions. With a view to the local elections, it found that for more than half of those surveyed “the local candidates were more important than their party affiliation”.

And, logically, this is taken to the extreme in the 395 direct elections for the top municipal offices. Because these are almost purely personality elections, tailored entirely to the candidate. Mario Mechtel, who leads the panel, has no usable data on the effects of the gender factor.

“We know that the candidate’s profession is an important factor in electoral success,” said the professor of economics. And the level of awareness. He doesn't know anything about gender.

Overall, however, direct elections have hardly been researched. This is also due to insufficient accessibility of the data: it is necessary to obtain it from the municipalities themselves. At least the NDR provides an incomplete overview in Lower Saxony. At the state level, the authorities refrain from making the results available.

Because other federal states also neglect this basic level of political participation, the results are usually interpreted quite freely in the press as party political signals and indications of federal political sentiment. However, there is not much to say for that.

Of the 123 runoff elections at all levels in Lower Saxony, only 56 had female participation. Considering the fact that only a good 20 percent of the 1,123 candidates were female and the majority of municipalities had not even thought of considering a female applicant for the top position, that is almost a statement.

Even more important: in mixed-gender duels, women do significantly better than men. Sure, there are exceptions. Where the AfD received the second most votes with a woman in the first round, as in Salzgitter, the pro-democratic front has reliably formed: pharmacist and animal lover Patricia Mair, AfD leader in the city council, was only able to repeat her 25 percent approval from the first round - despite being a woman and her respectable profession.

Pro-democratic attitudes are perhaps personality markers that stand out above all others: In Munster, the non-party administrative employee Anna Adamczak prevailed against the AfD candidate with 80 percent: Christoph Weynand is a professional soldier and that is certainly not perceived as a flaw in Munster.

Of the 54 male-female runoff elections, only 19 were won by male applicants. This cannot be linked to community characteristics: In the joint municipality of Mittelweser, the independent Sandra Wiechmann knocked out CDU man Malte Flamme in the second round.

And while the CDU was able to expand its parliamentary group in the not particularly urban town of Syke near Bremen, its mayoral candidate, an honorable farmer and honorary local mayor in the Heiligenfelde district, was distanced in the runoff by newcomer Claudia Schuch.

During her career, the bank clerk did not hide the fact that she had worked for debt collection companies in the past, an industry that is viewed with skepticism even by stock market trade newspapers. She also pointed out that she was currently responsible for receivables management at the local savings bank. But maybe that has a better ring to it in Syke than farmer.

The Osnabrück results support the importance of the gender factor even more clearly. That's how the Greens went under the same name in the district council elections, and yet Anna Kebschull, whose tactically motivated non-partisanship can't really fool anyone, was able to clearly defend her office. In the city council, however, the Greens are the strongest faction - and to the left of the CDU there would be a mathematical majority of almost 60 percent.

Nevertheless, the full-blooded Green politician Volker Bajus had no chance against the not undisputed Christian Democrat incumbent Katharina Pötter: in the second round of voting, with 43 percent, he was clearly below the progressive, socio-ecological voter potential. Bad luck for him. But it's good that masculinity is starting to be a disadvantage sometimes.