Dhat was not a vote on Peter Feldmann’s politics. The social-democratic mayor of the city of Frankfurt has to go because he failed because of the way he led his office and life. It’s amazing that there were people in the city to the very end who believed it was a class struggle between big business and the mayor of the little people. On the contrary: Precisely because Feldmann behaved in a way that had to be described too often in the past few weeks, politics was no longer an issue for this group when he was voted out. And it’s not just there: Feldmann arrested politicians in the city for months. He likes to talk about the “social city” and tells fairy tales about imaginary opponents on the way there. In fact, if he’s worked at all in the past few months, he’s been minding his own business. He was fully occupied with his divorce war, his criminal proceedings, with life in a surreal world he had designed himself.
The referendum to vote out was a demonstration of what democratic processes can still achieve in a municipality today. A few months ago, no one would have expected that enough voters would vote to reach the quorum of 30 percent of all those eligible to vote against. The fact that it worked out is a compliment for the city councilors in Römer, who took the risk of voting because Feldmann forced them to do so through his tactics. The election campaign of the deselection alliance was restrained enough and yet it worked: Now the quorum has even been exceeded by almost 50,000 votes.
