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reThe election of the mayor of Constance, which can be said with certainty after Sunday’s new elections after a tie in the first ballot, was a tremendous match for incumbent Ulrich Burchardt. Because the CDU politician only won by a narrow margin against his challenger Luigi Pantisano, who is a member of the Left Party and missed the goal, supported by a broad left-wing alliance with the participation of Konstanzer Grünen, to become the first Mayor of the Left Party in a West German state.
The majority of Konstanz citizens cast their votes by letter due to the crown, polling stations remained empty, but mobilization was high despite the pandemic. The turnout was 61 percent. At 9:10 pm the result was clear: Burchardt received 49.5 percent of the votes cast – Pantisano narrowly defeated with 45.1 percent. The CDU mayor was apparently unable to play an official bonus; In an interview published just days before the election, he only gave his own work a rating of two to three.
The 41-year-old architect Pantisano almost managed to be the first left-wing mayor of a major West German city to challenge the green-black or black-green coalition model ideally embodied by Green Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann. The pragmatic Burchardt, 49, ruled the city of a good 85,000 residents with a decidedly black and green program in his first term. But in the university town of Lake Constance, a lot of disappointment with the Burchardt administration has accumulated: despite the declaration of a climate emergency, the mayor had not voted in the summer for the fastest possible achievement of climate protection goals. in 2030. It does not want to reach climate neutrality until 2035. The city’s congress center registers millions in losses and its critics accuse it of having achieved very little in transport and housing policy.
At the Baden-Württemberg CDU, Burchardt’s victory eight years ago was seen as proof that not all university towns have to lose ground to the CDU from the start. For the Greens at the state level, a Pantisano victory would not have been a success that they could have celebrated magnificently before the state elections. Because that would also have made evident the failure of the state party, not having presented its own Green candidate, of all the places in the city where Horst Frank was elected mayor for the first time in the Republic in 1996. And the victory of Pantisano, who works in the office of left-wing federal president and Bundestag member Bernd Riexinger, he would have provided the CDU with new arguments for its thesis that the Southwest Greens are actually much more leftist than their prime minister Winfried Kretschmann.
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Pantisano’s good performance remains astonishing, because the politician, who is part of a left-wing ecological splinter group in the Stuttgart city council, had also produced negative headlines in his election campaign. It had been announced on the Tinder partner exchange and demanded that the Hafner development area, which had been implemented by Burchardt due to the severe housing shortage, also be built in a climate-neutral manner, which would have led to a later completion. and promoted the housing shortage. In the face of German-Russian politics or the “Nordstream 2” gas pipeline project, he also represented classical positions of the left and not of the Greens.
The son of Italian immigrants, who was born in Waiblingen, was massively threatened by right-wing extremists during the election campaign. He received letters saying: “Go back to Italy” or “They should sink you in Lake Constance.” Pantisano will not now move to Konstanz with his family. Burchardt promised on election night in his second term to work to fill the “trenches of the city.” The loser even congratulated the election winner with a handshake, despite the pandemic and the fact that the green-black state government had declared the red warning level on Saturday due to the sharp increase in the number of infected people. .
