Trudy Rubin: German election experience holds lessons for Democrats in pushing back MAGA

Cottbus, Germany, a modest-sized east German city near the Polish border, with its historic town square whose buildings date back as far as the 15th century, might seem a strange place to visit for ideas on how Democrats can reach MAGA voters in the United States.

Yet, I came here, two days before the Feb. 23 German election, to meet with Maja Wallstein, the energetic, 38-year-old mother of two young daughters who has represented Cottbus in the Bundestag since 2021. I wanted to find out how she, as a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party, campaigned in a city and region that had turned bright blue – the color of the far-right Alternative for Germany party that has been praised and promoted by Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance.

What I heard was both hopeful and sad.

First, some background. There are some stunning similarities in the shifting political landscapes of the United States and Germany that enabled Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, to double its national vote share this year. But there are also sharp historical differences that have, so far, kept that share to around 20% of parliament. And no mainstream party will form a coalition with a far-right party like the AfD, which downplays Nazi crimes.

Immigration has become a major issue over the past decade, as Germany still struggles to integrate the 1 million refugees it took in from Syria and Afghanistan between 2015 and 2016. The Germans are also still hosting hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who moved to Germany – temporarily, they hoped – after the 2022 Russian invasion. The AfD campaigned on a pledge of “reimmigration,” meaning mass deportation.

But for the AfD, as for the MAGA GOP, the very real immigration problem has become a way to tap into public anger at problems of daily life – rising food and energy costs, stagnant economic growth, and loss of industrial jobs.

These problems are particularly acute in eastern Germany, which was under communist rule and Moscow’s thumb until unification in 1991. Younger people flee to the more economically prosperous western Germany, leaving older citizens, dying villages and disaffected youths who are open to the AfD message. Think of America’s Rust Belt.

Young voters, already alienated by the pandemic and wooed by AfD’s sophisticated social media campaigns, have drifted toward the extremes, either the far-right or the leftist Die Linke party.

And as in the U.S., the AfD, like extreme MAGA, has fed off (even as it contributed to) the failure of mainstream parties to function. And the mainstream parties (in the U.S., I include Democrats and traditional Republicans) have failed to meet the challenge.

“A lot of Germans are fed up with the way the parties (in the governing coalition) are not cooperating and fighting with each other,” I was told by Stormy-Annika Mildner, director of the Aspen Institute Germany. “They are not able to govern.”

And, Mildner added, “They don’t talk enough to locals, or talk enough to the rural population.”

Which brings me back to parliament member Wallstein, and her passionate campaign to bridge the gap between the real problems of voters and their elected government.

“My goal,” she told me, in a small street-front office outside of which piles of campaign literature were being loaded into a truck by volunteers, “is to open the glass door which prevents people from hearing each other.” Conspiracy theorists may not want to listen, but many voters can be reached if they feel the politician cares.

In 2021, when her district trended toward her party, she won by 27% in a multiparty contest in which the AfD won 25%. To try to reach beyond her base, she promised her constituents she would walk through every village and hamlet in her district before the next ballot and listen to their problems, a task she has nearly completed.

“A lot of voters snapped at me. Not everyone laid down roses, but I didn’t walk away,” she told me. “I stayed, listened, and asked, ‘What did we do wrong? How did we lose you?’ I heard problems I could solve.”

This year, however, the political winds were blowing against her.

Wallstein’s efforts reminded me of the new Democratic U.S. senator from Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, who managed first to win a House seat, then move to the Senate, in a formerly Democratic state that went MAGA in 2024. She did so by focusing on voters’ immediate problems.

“No matter how loud they were at the beginning, and not all were turned into SPD voters, at the end most were respectful,” Wallstein told me.

I don’t know if she would have found such civility in the U.S. But I do believe her effort shows the necessity of trying to open that glass door in America, even if it has been fortified by far-right social media that has much more impact in the U.S. than in Germany.

What was striking in Cottbus, however, was that Wallstein repeatedly discovered the real angst, frustration, and pain that underlay hard-line positions on hot-button issues such as immigration. She managed to communicate directly, and often those emotions came pouring out.

In one small village near the Polish border, she asked an elderly man what his most pressing problem was, and he replied that he feared foreigners would steal his locked-up Vespa. As they conversed, it emerged that the scooter had belonged to his wife, who had recently died. Their conversation then shifted to the difference between foreigners in general and criminals. She invited him to visit her in the Bundestag.

She spoke with a woman puttering in her garden who said Germany’s biggest problem was Ukrainians, who weren’t real refugees because the U.S. had started the war. Wallstein realized that to deny that misinformation directly would have ended the conversation.

“Instead, I told her about a Ukrainian, her children, and their grandma who were staying with me, and how they couldn’t go home because their house had been bombed,” she said. “From that moment, she left her bubble and listened.”

This empathetic politician’s self-appointed task is not easy. She has received death threats by phone and email and has been followed by “big guys.”

“This is an area where neo-Nazis are everywhere,” she said. They are drawn toward the AfD, some of whose leaders downplay the years of Nazi rule and use Nazi phraseology. Her kids are registered at school by their first names, lest they be identified and attacked.

She believes Elon Musk’s promotion of the AfD legitimizes the party and may encourage its youthful supporters to attack her or her campaign volunteers. Yet, she refuses to stop her effort to break through glass doors.

Here comes the big question, then. Did she have any success in her re-election bid with her Slotkin-like approach? The answer: No, yes, and maybe.

Wallstein lost her run for parliament in her district to the AfD candidate by a substantial margin. The German system, however, also provides for political parties to run lists of candidates in regions, and the percentage of the votes the party wins determines how many on the list win a seat. Wallstein was high on her party’s list and will still remain in the Bundestag.

Moreover, I do believe Wallstein – and Slotkin in the U.S. – has put her finger on a key approach that democratic parties in Germany, and Democrats in the U.S., must recognize in coming elections.

“There are a multitude of reasons that voters turn to the AfD,” the German parliamentarian told me, “and it is not enough to respond to the content of the party’s positions.” The key to wooing voters back is to listen to and respond to their legitimate grievances.

Who knows, some of those voters whom Wallstein wooed on their doorsteps may vote for her next time.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the the Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers may write to her at: Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia 19101, or by email at trubin@phillynews.com.