Many people are not interested in politics and if they are interested in politics then they don’t like them, or better: the politicians. They’re even less popular than journalists, and even then, in a certain setting, one tries to slur, especially when a get-together has gotten so bland that it’s become a professional guess, “And what do you do?”
Fewer people would willingly sit down at a city council meeting in a medium-sized city, let alone follow the exercise of democracy there with such passion that they can’t help but applaud. But that is exactly what happened in Passau in June when the city council discussed the citizens’ initiative “Save the Passau Forests”. Supporters of the citizens’ initiative showed loud applause when they particularly liked a contribution.
One could now clap one’s hands happily at so much commitment, one could write Hubert Aiwanger on Twitter: “Bring it back democracy, it was never gone and there, in your Lower Bavaria, it’s doing particularly well!” You leave it then, there is a risk that Aiwanger will tweet back and the world has certainly seen enough Aiwanger tweets. But it certainly seems like good news when democracy arouses so much enthusiasm.
In the Passau town hall, however, they see things completely differently. “City council meetings should generally be able to take place without disruption,” the city said Passau New Press with. According to a legal commentary on the municipal code, listeners are not allowed to disturb. The question remains whether a verbal warning during the meeting is not sufficient or whether more rigorous action should be taken, as in Passau. There, all visitors now have to undergo a bag check. The reason given is that posters or banners could be taken away.
Of course, this has not happened so far, which is why some suspect that the recent hardships for visitors could be due to the fact that Mayor Jürgen Dupper (SPD) is not a friend of the citizens’ initiative. He would much rather have an industrial area around Passau instead of the forest. The fact that not a few, but even an astronomically large number of Passau residents do not see it that way should not make him happy. The citizens’ petition against Dupper’s plans collected around 7,000 signatures. Of course he can’t do anything about it – see: Democracy is alive – but he makes the rules in his town hall.
So the few people who are interested in politics and of them the few who are so warm to politics that they sit on a city council in their free time in the summer – things are now a little more difficult for these people in Passau made to love politics. The only hope left is that they do it anyway.