Episode 143: Germany’s Political Barometer
Eric Langenbacher
Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Dr. Eric Langenbacher is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Society, Culture & Politics Program at AGI.
Dr. Langenbacher studied in Canada before completing his PhD in Georgetown University’s Government Department in 2002. His research interests include collective memory, political culture, and electoral politics in Germany and Europe. Recent publications include Comparative Politics: Mapping Institutions, Power, and Legitimacy (2025), Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary German Politics and Policy (edited volume, 2024), The German Polity, 12th ed. (2021), and Twilight of the Merkel Era: Power and Politics in Germany after the 2017 Bundestag Election (edited volume, 2019).
Dr. Langenbacher remains affiliated with Georgetown University as Teaching Professor and Director of the Honors Program in the Department of Government, as well as the Director of the Master in European Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service. He has also taught at George Washington University, Washington College, The University of Navarre, and the Universidad Nacional de General San Martin in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has given talks across the world. He was selected Faculty Member of the Year by the School of Foreign Service in 2009 and was awarded a Fulbright grant in 1999-2000 and the Hopper Memorial Fellowship at Georgetown in 2000-2001. Since 2005, he has also been Managing Editor of German Politics and Society, which is housed in Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies. Dr. Langenbacher has also planned and run dozens of short programs for groups from abroad, as well as for the U.S. Departments of State and Defense on a variety of topics pertaining to American and comparative politics, business, culture, and public policy.
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American-German Institute in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AGI, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an MPP degree from Princeton University and BA and BS degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
__
Phyllis Berry
Non-Resident Senior Fellow
Phyllis Berry is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the American-German Institute. She was the National Intelligence Officer for Europe from June 2021 until March 2025. She also served at the National Intelligence Council as Acting NIO for Europe from July 2017 through April 2018, Deputy NIO from April 2018 through July 2020, and senior advisor on governance for the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group during 2015-16. She authored the European futures papers for the 2017 and 2021 NIC Global Trends reports. From late 2014 to mid-2015 she was Director for Ukraine at the National Security Council. Dr. Berry has a Ph.D. in comparative politics from Georgetown University and has taught European comparative politics, French politics, German politics, and comparative leadership.
Two state elections in western Germany this month resulted in one win for Chancellor Merz’s Christian Democrats and two poor outcomes for the Social Democrats. The Alternative for Germany, meanwhile, performed better than ever before in a western German state election. What do these results reveal about the state of German politics after one year of the Merz government? Jeff Rathke, Eric Langenbacher, and Phyllis Berry discuss how the results could impact critical negotiations to spur economic growth and other reforms in the pension and healthcare systems, as well as what political decisions now will affect this fall’s regional elections in the east, where the AfD is at its strongest.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Phyllis Berry, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, AGI
Eric Langenbacher, AGI Senior Fellow; Director, Society, Culture & Politics Program
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
Welcome to all of the listeners to this episode of The Zeitgeist. We are speaking on March 24, 2026, and I am joined here in the office by Phyllis Berry. Phyllis, good morning.
Phyllis Berry
Good morning.
Jeff Rathke
Phyllis is a non-resident senior fellow at AGI and previously was the U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Europe, among many other things. We also have with us from Berlin, Eric Langenbacher. Eric, hello, how are you?
Eric Langenbacher
I’m fine. Guten Tag.
Jeff Rathke
Eric has just arrived in Berlin, so we are glad to bring everybody together to talk about the state of German politics. We have just finished the spring edition of Germany’s state elections, and while we’ll make reference to those results, we won’t go too deep into the details of state politics but instead take it as a barometer of what’s happening nationally and what this means for the German government and for Germany’s political direction. Let’s start off with a few facts. There was an election in Rheinland-Pfalz, a state in the southwest of Germany. That happened on Sunday. And didn’t go too well for the Social Democrats. Anybody like to fill in the blanks here?
Eric Langenbacher
I’ll say a few things. They came in with just under 26 percent of the vote, which was a nearly 10 percent drop from the last election, which was back in 2021. The CDU (Christian Democrats) actually won the election with 31 percent, going up by 3.3 percent. And then we have the AfD (Alternative for Germany) coming in at 19.5, which is a little bit more, I think, than they did in Baden-Württemberg a couple of weeks ago, and was an 8 or 9 percent increase. The FDP (Free Democrats) didn’t make it into the parliament. The Free Voters, the Freie Wähler, didn’t make it into the parliament, nor did the Left Party make it into parliament. The Greens did with about 7.9 percent of the vote. What’s interesting is there’s only four parties now that will be in the next Landtag in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
The one thing that I want to say is, I know that the banner headline was the collapse of the SPD (Social Democratic) vote. And sure, a 10 percent reduction from the last time is obviously pretty horrible, right? But it’s not like what they did in Baden-Württemberg, where they barely made the 5 percent threshold with 5.5 percent. All things considered, this is still more than double what they’re polling nationally. That’s just something to think about, maybe a little bit of context.
Jeff Rathke
Phyllis.
Phyllis Berry
I might make a slight caveat to that to say, to me, it reflects the fact that state elections are a combination of national trends and state trends. I mean, nationally, it was the worst-ever result that the SPD got in the state. It was actually the second-worst-ever result the CDU got in the state, which reflects the weakness of both of the two so-called major parties. It was the best result the AfD has gotten in any west German state, which reflects its ability to establish roots. It’s still much stronger in eastern Germany, but it has become more of a force in western Germany. Again, the FDP didn’t make the 5 percent hurdle, which has been a trend for the FDP. They’re in, I don’t know if it’s the weakest position ever, but it’s the weakest position they’ve been in since the mid-2010s. The Left was never in the state parliament here. The Left is doing a little bit better than it had. It reflects that those national trends actually were pretty consistent. It also reflects the fact of, in state elections, the importance of the candidates. In Rhineland-Pfalz, you’re starting from a position in which the SPD had been in government for 35 years. It was also a big defeat for them that way. But they did have a somewhat popular minister-president, not popular enough to bust through the trends, but they had a much higher starting point there than they had, say, in Baden-Württemberg or they have across the country.
Eric Langenbacher
If I can just jump in there one more time, I want to reference a couple of great things that I think we did at the American-German Institute the last while. We had a webinar with Torsten Faas, who’s a visiting DAAD professor up in Toronto. And then we did a podcast with Wolfgang Muno, who’s at the University of Rostock in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. And both of them had very insightful things to say about local elections. Fass said that there seems to be this trend in regional elections in recent years that the incumbent minister-president or the incumbent party makes a spurt at the very end and does better than they were polling, sometimes can even win the election. And we saw that in Baden-Württemberg. But it’s interesting because the incumbent minister-president in that state is stepping down, but they got the next-best thing to a well-known incumbent. And all the polling showed this. Everybody knew who Cem Özdemir [the Green candidate in Baden- Württemberg] is, because he was a national leader. He was minister, very well-known. In Rhineland-Palatinate, they had a long-serving minister-president, Malu Dreyer, who was quite beloved. And then in July 2024, she stepped down and was replaced by [Alexander] Schweitzer. So, sure, he was the incumbent, but it’s not like he had a full term or longer to develop that kind of camaraderie. I think that the fact that he wasn’t even in office for two years may have played a role in diminishing that incumbency effect that people have been observing elsewhere.
Jeff Rathke
Where we stand now is the Christian Democrats, who had hoped to win two elections—in Baden-Württemberg early March and in Rheinland-Pfalz this past weekend. They won one. They will be in both governments. So not a bad outcome from the point of view of Chancellor Merz. A bad outcome from the point of view of the Social Democrats, where, as we’ve discussed, they barely scraped in in Baden-Württemberg, and they lose the top position in Rheinland-Pfalz. What does this mean now for the German government? When Friedrich Merz took office just about a year ago, he talked about reforms, the need for Germany to reform, to get the economy going again, to take care of some of the problems that had accumulated, and that Germany had become a bit sclerotic, with basically flat economic growth from 2019 until the present day, more or less, and that Germany needed reforms and that those had to start at the beginning of a new legislative period. Well, reality intervened. This government in Berlin has a very narrow majority. They have to negotiate carefully to get laws through. The result was that the big reforms—health care, pension reforms—have all been pushed off. And now we’ve got this period where you’ve got a couple of months until the summer break where they’re going to have to start moving on these things. How realistic does that look?
Phyllis Berry
Well, I’d say two things about this. The good news is that both parties understand the need for reform. All the leaders of the SPD take that seriously. The question is, again, when you have a coalition out of two parties that just don’t really have similar policies is how you make those compromises. I might also add, there was another election on Sunday, and they were local elections in Bavaria, and they didn’t come out so great for the CSU and Markus Söder, the minister-president there—this is the third party in the [federal] coalition. They lost a number of localities to the Freie Wähler, which is quite strong in Bavaria. And in Munich, a Green mayor was elected, and the CSU did everything possible to help the SPD get reelected there. So, Söder is also feeling weakened. You have a coalition now where all three leaders don’t feel great. Merz is comfortable in his position. Making compromises that go beyond the just lowest common denominator, that’s the real challenge. One thing about the SPD and the CDU/CSU is they will come to some sort of compromise. This is not the FDP, and this is one of the problems for the Free Democrats who were in the previous federal government who would just take a no. These parties are more professional in the sense of they will come to a compromise. The problem is, will the compromises be enough to deal with what is a structurally weak economy that’s then further weakened by what’s going on in the Middle East and Ukraine?
Jeff Rathke
Let’s turn maybe also to the SPD, because as you said, Phyllis, they are weakened. They seem to be avoiding any kind of personnel consequences at the federal level. There is no one right now who is trying to dethrone the party’s two co-chairs, Lars Klingbeil and Bärbel Bas. Lars Klingbeil is the vice chancellor and the finance minister. Bärbel Bas is the labor minister. They appear to be secure in their positions. However, one loss after another, there is a question of whether the SPD is going to be willing to swallow difficult reforms that really reset some of the problems Germany has to enable economic growth in the future. Any views on how that may develop?
Phyllis Berry
We also have the problem in the CDU/CSU. We’ve seen there that Friedrich Merz has not really been in total control of his caucus, either. Particularly with, then, the complicating factor of the CSU. For example, on tax reform, all three parties accept the idea and really want to reform the income tax. The presumption is, to get that, there will be some sort of trade-off. Everyone wants to lower the cost for the low-earning workers, so low-wage workers, but the SPD wants a trade-off on the top. There are elements that the CDU are willing to consider, but Markus Söder has said no tax increases of any kind. And that is going to be a major issue in coming to compromise on, I think, just about everything you mentioned here. Because if there’s a structural deficit that they have to also deal with-
Jeff Rathke
You mean a budget deficit.
Phyllis Berry
Budget deficit. The compromise there, I think, the problem comes from both directions. Klingbeil is in a weak position to push things through with his caucus. But what we’ve seen actually in the first ten months is more problems from the CDU/CSU side, actually, when there’s been a coalition agreement, Christian Democratic caucus doesn’t necessarily also follow its leadership on that. And there’s a revolt from the side that wants more reform, more what we would consider market.
Jeff Rathke
And that’s why the pension reform didn’t get done earlier. That’s true.
Eric Langenbacher
Policy aside for a second, this is the structural dilemma of German politics right now. I was just tabulating really quickly, and the SPD has been in government, either as a senior or junior coalition partner, for 24 years since 1998. The only time they weren’t in government over this whole period was between 2009 and 2013. I think that the best thing for the SPD, if we want to talk about personnel renewal, programmatic renewal, would be a stint in the opposition. But the system’s caught, because you can’t build a government without the SPD under current circumstances, even if you look at polling and things like that. That’s just going to further empower the AfD.
I was thinking back to a parallel that we should think about a little bit more often—maybe we can do a Zeitgeist episode on this as well—which is the Austrian example. Because, you know, folks will recall that Austria had grand coalitions between the SPÖ (Social Democratic Party of Austria) and ÖVP (Austria People’s Party) all throughout 50s the until 1966. And then again, starting in the 90s for more often than not since then. I’m also reminded of the first grand coalition that Germany had between 66 and 69. And then if you recall, in the 1969 election, I think it was the NPD, this right radical party, got like 4.9 percent of the vote. The argument is that when the main leftist and the main right-wing party come together, it’s going to empower the fringes. Germany has to find a way to get out of this structural dilemma that it’s in so you could actually get, instead of like cross cleavage governments—which everybody loves, you know, bipartisanship, yay, in theory. But in practice, there’s a reason that the Left Party and the AfD and maybe even the BSW are doing better than people would have expected. Sure, they’ll compromise. They’ll have some kind of policy reforms, but I don’t think any of this is going to stem the lack of momentum that the SPD has.
Phyllis Berry
The basic issue to me, though, is restoring economic growth. If we go and look at the AfD, I totally agree that this is a problem with grand coalitions, is then you don’t have a clear alternation of power, so if you’re dissatisfied with the government, you go to the extremes. The even bigger problem in Germany is the effect of lack of growth for several years now. When we look at the rise of the AfD, it hasn’t been continuous. The party did badly, relatively badly in the 2021 era, as Germany came out of COVID and the government was seen as having handled that, at least that time, reasonably well. And as there was a prospect for more growth and as the international situation was relatively calm. And of course, that’s when Scholz came from behind and the Social Democrats actually led the government, you know, came in first in the election.
Jeff Rathke
Right, the AfD got 8.8 percent.
Phyllis Berry
Right, and in every state election, they dropped support from their previous, from the 2016-17 period. This issue of restoring growth is a major, core issue. It’s more difficult when you have a heterogeneous coalition as you have, because again, they come to least common denominator issues, and they’re really tough structural challenges that Germany are facing. Another thing that Eric and I were talking about earlier is you have a coalition now where the chancellor and the vice chancellor both actually seem more interested in foreign policy than domestic policy. Klingbeil has to do the vice chancellor and SPD finance minister. He’s got to do domestic policy in that he’s responsible for the budget. That also makes him responsible—if you combine him with the labor minister, also SPD, the other co-chair of the party, Bärbel Bas—they’re in control of two of the biggest reforms. Any kind of tax reform comes out of the finance ministry, and then the social security reform comes out of the labor ministry. The SPD has the lead on these issues, but there aren’t clear answers about what to do with this.
Jeff Rathke
We’re talking about the AfD in part, but let’s just switch completely into that gear. As we’ve said at the start, this was the best result in Rheinland-Pfalz and, by the way, in Baden-Württemberg, the best results that the AfD has had up to now in a West German state. In that sense, you can say this is a big leap forward. On the other hand, what you see, like you were just pointing out, Phyllis, is that the AfD did poorly in some past elections. Now they’re getting results in these state elections, which are in line with where they have polled nationally for basically for the past year and since the Bundestag election in 2025. In that way, they’re catching up as these elections happen to where they’ve been more or less at the national level. That reference point really determines whether people describe this as a huge breakthrough for the AfD, or in fact, just, continuing along?
Eric Langenbacher
I was looking at some of the exit polling that Forschungsgruppe Wahlen did after the Rhineland-Palatinate election. One of the things that caught my eye was that 95 percent of AfD voters said they voted for the AfD based on the AfD’s program and their policy positions and not out of protest or frustration. That’s a very important data point, which probably should make us start thinking a little bit more differently about the AfD and its staying power.
The other thing I wanted to mention, too, in both of these two elections this last month in these two states, is the AfD continues to draw substantial support from previous non-voters. I’ve heard this for several electoral cycles, that that’s one of their biggest pools of support. Germany doesn’t have atrocious turnout rates like the United States does, especially for state or local elections; there’s still robust turnout rates. It’s almost like there’s an unlimited pool of non-voters or previous non-voters for the AfD to choose from. I thought that was a very fascinating point as well.
But Jeff, I also agree with you 100 percent that I was actually a little frustrated after the Bundestag election last year, because all of the headlines were how well the AfD did at 20.8 percent of the vote. And my point is that this is where they’ve been polling for two years. I wasn’t surprised that they got what they were polling. And it’s the same thing in these state elections as well.
Phyllis Berry
I agree with you about the first-time vote, or well, the non-voters, and I’ve been struck by that too, because again, the party’s doing substantially better, but it keeps getting a big chunk of non-voters. Now, I’m curious if these are people that just didn’t vote in the previous election and the non-voting pool could be a changing pool of voters. As you said, there’s a certain degree of normalization of the party, particularly in eastern Germany, but also in western Germany. But at the same time, it is still viewed by supporters of all the other parties as extreme. I was struck by one of the polls, again, that showed, exit polls that showed that among CDU voters, among SPD voters, among Greens voters, it was all above 90 percent who would say it would be a bad thing for them to be in government. It’s still not a party like the others, but it is more normal than it was. It has a broader range of supporters than it started out with. And some of that is, particularly in eastern Germany, when you get 30-some percent of the vote, that’s going to cross over into different groups of voters. The one set of voters it can’t get are older Germans. It is always disproportionately weak among the oldest voters. It does well among younger voters, but it’s not disproportionately strong among younger voters. Younger voters have shown a lot of volatility from election to election.
Jeff Rathke
Exactly. I think that’s an important point, because if you look at the age profile among, for voters in Rheinland-Pfalz, under age 44, the AfD finished first. But as Phyllis pointed out, it was only a few years ago in the Bundestag election in 2021 where the youth vote was won by the Greens and the FDP. They took 50 percent of the youth vote, and that has kind of evaporated. That’s more of a reflection of voting for parties that are out of power as a way of effecting change, rather than voting for the content of a program. As you pointed out, it’s true that the AfD remains an ostracized party among the mainstream political party supporters. And that may be our transition point to talk about what’s coming up in the fall. But Eric, you had a point you wanted to make first.
Eric Langenbacher
I just wanted to make the point that I’ve made before, but I think bears repeating, which is when this paper was, I don’t know if it was leaked or if it was issued or whatever last summer, the strategy paper for the AfD. The AfD itself estimates that its ceiling of support is 30 percent in the electorate. They had all these strategies for how they could get another 20 percent of Germans to at least not block them and maybe at least to tolerate them. So the AFD itself thinks that 30 percent is what we’re talking about.
Jeff Rathke
Now let’s look ahead because there will be some scrutiny over whether Germany starts to make progress, the federal government makes progress on some of the reforms, the tax reform, the health care reform, pension reform, and the broader budget issues that loom for 2027 and 2028. The other big litmus test, or at least data point, is going to be elections that take place in three states in September. One of those is Saxony-Anhalt. That happens first. And then you have an election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern—I hate saying West Pomerania, sorry—and in the city of Berlin. And in at least two of those, in Saxony-Anhalt and in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the AfD is leading in the polls by far. You could have them finish first, that seems the most likely outcome. I think we can all anticipate that the international media and a lot of German news as well will be fixated on this question: Oh, my God, the AfD won in a state. What’s going to happen? What’s going to change?
Phyllis Berry
Well, can I just make two points? First, I’d say there’s another factor in the election, and that is inflation and energy prices. The AfD lost support in the 2021 period. When you look at the increase in support when the party started rising again, it’s not connected to immigration. It was actually connected with a spike in energy costs and inflation. These elections this month were really probably too soon. But if we have continued really high energy prices—and the party tends to emphasize a lot of those—it’s an anti-green platform and seems to do well playing off the inflation issue. So that could pump up their support.
Jeff Rathke
And it would also just be a more general anti-incumbency environment.
Phyllis Berry
Right, right. The other point I would make is I think the two western German state elections really do have lessons for the two. Let’s put Berlin aside, because city-states have unique electorates and are always a little bit different. But in both of those states, you have weak incumbents. In Saxony-Anhalt, you have a case, if Schweitzer wasn’t in office very long in Rhineland-Palatinate, you had a change in minister-president in Saxony-Anhalt in late January, to try to set him up for this coming election. And in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, you have Schwesig, a minister-president who remains popular, but is not as popular as she once was. So you have that point. The expectation that we’ve seen in state elections of a narrowing so that the incumbent makes up support, you usually don’t see that movement until about a month before the election. If we look at the gap, between the two parties now, we should expect a much narrower difference between the AfD and whoever is the incumbent party.
Eric Langenbacher
I mean, I’m going to look at both of those elections as tests of this hypothesis that this incumbency effect, when you have a strong incumbent, to see if that actually can be substantiated. We haven’t talked about Berlin at all. I’m sure we will as that election starts to loom, but the polling is really fascinating. It’s the CDU that’s in first at like 22 percent. Then we have SPD 16, Greens 15, Left Party 15, AfD 17. It’s almost a tie among four parties for second place. That’ll be a very fascinating result if it holds.
Jeff Rathke
Last topic, we spoke about the FDP, and Phyllis, you made the point that the FDP has had other difficult periods in its history, but they’ve had an especially bad run over the last couple of years. The last time they made it into a state parliament was in 2023 in the state of Hesse, where they scraped in, basically, with 5 percent of the vote. Every state election since then, they have fallen below the 5 percent threshold. They didn’t make it back into the Bundestag. And the chairman of the FDP has basically announced that he will step down and run again for the party leadership at the next party convention. But there’s not many people who are really competing to take over the FDP. Is this a party that’s on an inexorable decline? Or have we already said too much about this?
Phyllis Berry
Well, I would say two things. First, one thing that’s clear is that at least the last two times the FDP’s been in government, the general public or its voters even haven’t liked it because the last period that was comparable to this period came after they were in federal power in 2009, 2013. And they were, they fell down to a position pretty much where they are now, and then they slowly dug out. So in some ways, it’s not actually an unprecedented position for the party. It is very difficult, and I think also because they don’t have a very clear, strong alternative leader. when this happened in the teens, Christian Lindner came up and he was already there. They had someone who could gain public attention and also the trust of the kind of business, middle class voters that they look toward. This time, it’s not as clear. Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has actually announced that she would be willing to be a co-chair. She’s the one strong, popular name, somebody with real name recognition, who’s on television all the time, might be able to help someone. She’s a member of the European Parliament. But I agree. I think the party’s in a really difficult position, because one of the things we do see is that, and this goes to something Eric said back earlier, I would think for the SPD it would be good to be in opposition, but being in opposition hasn’t been helpful for very many parties and very many times. Part of what’s happened to the FDP is people just don’t think about it. We may think about it, but the average German voter who doesn’t spend much time thinking about politics, they just have lost any kind of attention there. I think it is a more difficult position for the party than at any time. I would just caveat this in that party allegiances are overall much weaker than they once were. There is a stable group of older voters. And while in Germany, that’s a significant, that remains a significant percentage of the voters, party identification is weaker. So things can change. Nobody believed in 2020 that the SPD could come in first place in the 2021 election. The FDP has been counted out, I think, throughout my whole adult life. There have been periods when I thought, this is finally it for the FDP. And the reality is that we get these surges of support for parties. I think these smaller parties that appeal to middle class voters and educated voters—and that would be more the FDP and Greens—they have a hard time in economic tough times. They just seem to get squeezed out in situations like this, if you look at when they rose again, when they were doing better. The other problem with the FDP was it was always seen as the corrective to the CDU or the SPD. And I think people thought they overcorrected.
Jeff Rathke
Yeah. Eric, over to you. Last word.
Eric Langenbacher
I agree with Phyllis 100 percent. I remember being in the Bundestag in the 1990s, and people in the FDP Fraktion were crying because of bad result, and they thought that they were toast. So, I’ll believe it when I see it. The final thing I wanted to add is we should also let our viewers know that the new Green mayor of Munich is a gay man. And it’s somehow serendipitous because the reason I’m here in Berlin is to do our very last study tour for our Building LGBTQ+ Communities. So I’m sure we’ll be talking a lot about that.
Jeff Rathke
Thank you, Eric, for taking time out of this trip to join us so soon after the elections. And Phyllis, thank you for being here in person in Washington with us. And we look forward to having all of our listeners with us on the next episode of the Zeitgeist.
This transcript was generated by the Transcribe feature on Microsoft Word. It has been edited for clarity.
