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The cliches stick to real life, like chewing gum spitting in the street on the sole of the next passer’s shoe. And the more nostalgic they are, the tougher they are.
The cliché of the Ruhr area as a workers’ bastion with smoking chimneys is chewing gum. The region is still told in this way, primarily as a story of decadence. A year and a half ago, for example, when the last mine in Bottrop was closed (transparency notice: author’s hometown). The federal president (nota bene: social democrat) took the last lump of coal. The tenor: There it goes, good time.
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This cliché always included that the Ruhr area was owned by the SPD. In regards to that, a story of decline should be told anew from Sunday. If new councilors and mayors are elected in North Rhine-Westphalia, symbolic positions in the Ruhr area threaten to be lost, for example in Dortmund. Here, the SPD always won about 57 percent in municipal elections in the 1960s and 1970s. This time both the Greens and the CDU have been so close in the mayoral election that the SPD could lose the second round.
SPD likely to lose votes to Greens in Ruhr area
In the SPD, it is likely that the grinding is in the mill of those who believe that the salvation of the party lies in the thematic reflection on the workers. In turn, they assume a weakness for classic industrial policy, a tough stance on refugee problems, law and order generally, and a pronounced dislike of the whole Berlin identity-politics chichi.
It is often overlooked, and this brings us back to the cliché of the Ruhr area, that the SPD suffers less from the fact that workers flee from it. Rather, it means that there are simply fewer and fewer workers. Yes, also in the Ruhr area. Across Germany, white-collar workers (that is, main workers) outnumbered workers (that is, craftsmen and bodyworkers) in terms of proportion of the population already in the early 2000s. The situation is similar in the Ruhr area: here, the share of the labor force was recently just above the national average.
Yes, fewer workers vote for the SPD. But above all there are fewer and fewer workers
In general, the image of the nostalgic, angry bourgeois and structurally weak Ruhr area is incorrect. My former colleagues now work in robotics research and urban marketing, for energy providers, for the savings bank and as a teacher. Above all, they have one thing in common: many have stayed and love living in the Ruhr area. A survey by WDR of local elections shows that these are by no means just anecdotes from a high school bubble: satisfaction with life in Dortmund and Essen is very high, over 80 percent.
New Ruhr Area Citizens Apparently Find Greens Attractive
As the Mercator Foundation has elaborated in its Ruhr 2019 study: Yes, there are municipalities in debt and in some cases unemployment above the average. But there are also startups and service providers, and therefore a new, broader middle class. With the exception of Duisburg, these citizens, as the survey also shows, are not concerned about the fact that many immigrants and their descendants live here. The most important problem is traffic.
So it’s no wonder that after rural Bavaria, the Greens are also successful in the “working-class cities”. The SPD can learn from this to break the cliché. Because if you can’t get rid of the gum, at some point you will get stuck.
