Power Shift

The city of Dortmund has elected Alexander Omar Kalouti as its new mayor. "So what?" one might ask; new city leaders are constantly being chosen somewhere, it's just part of everyday democracy. Well, not in Dortmund. Because this city of 600,000 inhabitants, the ninth largest in Germany and a political heavyweight, has been led by the SPD (Social Democratic Party) since the founding of the Federal Republic. Dortmund, the steelworker and coal mining city, is seen by the center-left as its ancestral home, the "heartland of social democracy," according to SPD luminaries like Johannes Rau and Franz Müntefering. However, this is a social democracy that presents itself here as conservatively as rarely seen elsewhere, in close cooperation with trade unions and a social milieu associated with ...