Opinion: Last month, Berlin city councillors sent letters to 20,000 residents inviting them to discuss what happens next to one of the city’s best-known parks.
Tempelhofer Feld, a former Nazi-era airport-turned-park, is huge and historic. It has gone from a grand symbol of Hitler’s building prowess to an icon of post-war democracy. This was where American planes landed during the Soviet blockade of Berlin, part of the 1948-49 airlift that kept the city out of communist hands.
Tempelhofer Feld opened as a park in 2010 and today, it’s a vast green space intersected by runways. On summer weekends, its 3.5sq km are packed with roller skaters, skateboarders, dog walkers, cyclists and the smoke of a thousand tiny barbecues.
In winter, it’s a vast construction site for snowmen. In between seasons, it’s a musical breeding ground for migrating skylarks. In other words, it’s a bit of an urban treasure.
A few years ago, there was talk of building apartments here to remedy Berlin’s housing crisis. But local activists, suspecting real estate profiteering, organised a city-wide referendum asking Berliners what they wanted. The referendum was long and complicated and involved two painstaking polls. But in a victory for grassroots activism, in 2014 a majority voted to keep the airport wilderness as is, where is.
The park’s referendum was an example of what is known as direct democracy, where the ballot asks one simple question and gets one simple answer. Other perhaps less-pleasing specimens include Brexit in 2016 and a 2009 decision to ban minarets in Switzerland.
Now, despite the fact that city residents voted to save Tempelhofer Feld, the topic is being discussed again. The Berlin city authorities are currently led by a different, more conservative coalition that wants to overturn the referendum. Its left-leaning predecessors could also have done this but they said that direct democracy – like the Tempelhofer vote – deserves special consideration because of what it represents. However, the city’s mayor, Kai Wegner, has decided to ignore all that.
It’s enraging: Berlin’s elected officials acting against the clearly expressed wishes of their roller-skating, barbecuing constituents. Then again, there’s a bit of this about at the moment. And Tempelhofer Feld might even be one of the less-important instances.
For example, in the latest opinion polls, 69% of Germans say they don’t believe that what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip is justified. Yet most of the country’s politicians still criminalise locals protesting against potential genocide.
Another example: migration is allegedly the big issue at June’s European Parliament election. To ensure re-election, centre-right politicians have been cosying up to foreign despots and domestic extremists, enacting migration policies that human rights organisations describe as dangerous, disturbing and downright useless.
At the same time, opinion polls suggest Europe’s voters may not actually care all that much about migration. “Although a good many EU governments remain hostile or at least very wary [about] immigration, the public mood appears more open,” EU- focused thinktank Friends of Europe surmised last month.
In New Zealand, a similar scenario might involve the government’s “fast-track consenting”. Do New Zealanders really want coal mines in their nature reserves? The answer, as in all these cases, appears to be: who cares what they think, let’s do it anyway.
Could the rumble of bulldozers moving into a Berlin city park, or a New Zealand conservation area, be a distant death knell for democracy as we know it? Only time will tell. For now, all we can do is vote.
Cathrin Schaer is a freelance journalist living in Berlin.
