The True Power Center of Germany Isn’t Berlin

When you arrive by train in the German city of Hannover, a regional capital of more than half a million people, very little stands out as unique. On the approach from Berlin, you pass quiet suburbs before your train rolls through a city center made up of a jumble of 19th- and 20th-century architectural styles. Once you leave the railway station, you’ll find yourself walking past a statue of Ernst August, one of Hannover’s 19th-century kings, before turning toward the regional parliament of Lower Saxony, the German state of which Hannover is the capital.

The unspectacular urban landscape of a city that is neither uniquely beautiful nor overwhelmingly ugly has led many to ignore it as they travel onward to larger cities that have captured the global imagination. Yet this provincial facade is highly deceptive. For a region of 8 million people that is widely mocked for being boring, Lower Saxony has over the past three decades generated power networks that play a central role in German politics. Those networks are legible today in the rise to power of Germany’s new defense minister and the co-chairman of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD), among other senior officials.

Growing up in Hannover, I experienced an environment that was both small enough for everyone to know everyone else in political, business, and cultural circles yet large enough to be connected with global flows of information and capital. With Hannover as its provincial metropolis, Lower Saxony is defined by a parochial cosmopolitanism that shapes the social outlook of its political elites before they go on to major roles in national politics. To understand the German government and its distinctive approach to policy, it helps to first understand Lower Saxony.

The special role Lower Saxon politicians play as power brokers in the politics of the Federal Republic is a recent phenomenon. Until the early 1970s, politicians from the Rhineland or Baden-Württemberg dominated the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Kurt Georg Kiesinger. The hegemony the Christian Social Union exerted over Bavaria gave its leadership a substantial role through its alliance with the CDU. In Lower Saxony, by contrast, the existence of a rival center-right party in Heinrich Hellwege’s German Party meant that the CDU struggled to build a strong position until the German Party and the CDU merged in 1961.

Despite the SPD’s strength in factory towns dominated by Volkswagen, such as Wolfsburg and Salzgitter, the even greater strength of the party in the Ruhr region and Hamburg meant that its Lower Saxon leadership would play only a secondary role on the national stage. In the first SPD-led government under Chancellor Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, Social Democrats from Lower Saxony often felt outmaneuvered by party bosses from other regions.

Lower Saxony’s shift from out of this marginal position gained momentum in the 1970s. Under SPD Mayor Herbert Schmalstieg, who managed to rack up an extraordinary 34 years in office between 1972 and 2006, Hannover’s infrastructure was extensively modernized. This period also saw the emergence of figures such as Gerhard Schröder, Sigmar Gabriel, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Boris Pistorius, and Thomas Oppermann, who would rise through the ranks in Lower Saxony before going on to dominate the national SPD by the late 1990s.

On the regional level, Ernst Albrecht’s period as CDU minister-president of Lower Saxony between 1976 and 1990 witnessed economic growth propelled by Volkswagen’s rise as a global player in the automotive sector. Albrecht’s pragmatic style, and even liberal instincts over such issues as South Vietnamese refugee migration, proved a major influence on a generation of younger politicians. Albrecht’s blend of relatively liberal economic and social politics with conservative family values influenced the approach of figures who rose up the ranks in the Lower Saxon CDU in the 1990s and early 2000s, including his daughter, Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission.

Albrecht’s defeat by Schröder in the 1990 regional elections marked the consolidation of this Lower Saxon political model. Rather than marking a break with Albrecht’s style of government, the SPD under Schröder adopted his predecessor’s pragmatic style.

But beyond this tradition of pragmatic centrism, the politics of Lower Saxony have long been shaped by its local political economy, specifically its tradition of industrial policy. With the Lower Saxon regional government holding a 20 percent share of Volkswagen since World War II, the boundaries between the state, big business, and trade unions have long been blurred. Opaque interactions between the government and leading economic actors were a routine part of regional politics, with the aim of protecting the region’s industries and their employees.

The worlds of business and politics became tightly linked, with regional power brokers fostering close relationships and multiplying their influence beyond their official powers. This was such an open secret in the state that one group of networked politicians became nicknamed the “Maschsee Mafia” after the name of a lake in Hannover. The willingness of the city’s organized crime hierarchy, under the control of Hells Angels boss Frank Hanebuth, to stick to unwritten rules over where to enforce its grip fueled rumors over the extent to which the political mafia was involved as well.

This form of backroom politics eventually became a focus of public discontent. Bolstered by ongoing protests against a nuclear waste site near the town of Gorleben as well as the emergence of punk subcultures hostile to police authority, the Greens managed to establish a strong presence in the state by the early 1990s. In parallel, the demands by Volkswagen and other manufacturers for cheap labor led to the growth of immigrant communities that often became frustrated by institutional discrimination. These tensions boiled over into mass protest and even riots by punks during the so-called Chaos Days of August 1995.

Yet the Lower Saxon style of corporatism also found ways of integrating such potential sources of disruption. Schröder’s path to becoming German chancellor in the late 1990s was smoothed by social policies he oversaw in Lower Saxony that provided state subsidies for independent youth centers and local cultural projects with performance spaces and bars, such as the Glocksee complex in central Hannover. The regional government thus channeled anti-authoritarian youth subcultures into organizational frameworks linked to state institutions.

In the process, the emerging Greens became accommodated to the state’s power structures, as their electoral success generated incentives for them to work with the established parties to achieve their goals. In this environment—in which Lower Saxon elites were willing to share power with immigrant communities and alternative subcultures as long as they accepted the rules of the game—it was no coincidence that Hannover became the first large German city to elect a Turkish German mayor, Belit Onay of the Greens, in 2019.

Since the late 1990s, Lower Saxony’s paradoxical approach to politics—its combination of corporate statism with pragmatic deal-making that defuses potentially threatening outside forces by offering them access to positions and patronage as long as they stick to the rules of the game—has proved remarkably resilient. It has fostered the development of tightly disciplined political networks with strong links to big business and trade unions in each of the main parties that have been able to maneuver into substantial positions of influence on the national level. This pragmatic mutual support on the regional level has also proved a crucial advantage against more divided and less disciplined rival networks from other regions in the vicious competition for key positions.

This corporatist style of governance that smoothed Schröder’s rise in Lower Saxony was both a source of strength and weakness for his SPD-Green coalition after he became chancellor in 1998. The pragmatic willingness to absorb new communities that gradually de-escalated social tensions in 1990s Hannover was one of several factors that influenced how he approached the liberalization of citizenship law and issues surrounding LGBT rights. The ability to draw on a close network of contacts linking trade unions, every major political party, and major corporations enabled Schröder to successfully implement change in welfare and economic policy. It is no coincidence that controversial Hartz 4 reforms to the unemployment benefit system were named after Peter Hartz, a senior Volkswagen executive whom Schröder had appointed as head of a reform commission.

Yet the extent to which Lower Saxon corporatism also encouraged opaque deal-making in the interests of export-dependent manufacturers also left problematic long-term legacies. Schröder’s unwillingness to rethink aspects of Germany’s economic model reflected how much he was shaped by a corporatist environment in which the interests of industrial businesses were seen as inseparable from the interests of the state. In an environment in which business, trade union, and political networks were intertwined, it was not a huge leap for Schröder to go from close relations with the Lower Saxon corporate elite to deep personal involvement in a Russian oil and gas sector focused on taking control of German energy markets.

Even as Schröder sinks into disgrace because of his refusal to repudiate his links with Vladimir Putin’s regime, the strong grip on German politics of the Lower Saxon networks he helped foster has survived in the current “traffic light coalition” between the Free Democratic Party, Greens, and SPD under Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Though Scholz himself is associated with the Hamburg SPD, senior SPD figures such as SPD co-chairman Lars Klingbeil and Labor Minister Hubertus Heil are deeply anchored in Lower Saxon politics.

The strength of such political networks was visible in the way that, in the face of a crisis of German military readiness, Scholz replaced Christine Lambrecht as defense minister with Pistorius, who as interior minister in the Lower Saxon government had developed a reputation for solving tough problems in the teeth of fierce opposition. Appointing someone with extensive links to security services, manufacturers, and trade unions could be essential to success in the defense ministry, widely considered the toughest job in German politics. But it is questionable whether a figure as steeped in Lower Saxon corporatism as Pistorius is capable of initiating the radical reforms needed to turn the German military’s fortunes around.

The influence of the Lower Saxon style of governance can also be found among the Greens. Though Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock’s career gained momentum after she moved to Berlin, her strong links to the Lower Saxon Greens going back to her youth in Hannover’s suburbs helped strengthen her position. Among an older generation of Lower Saxon Greens, Jürgen Trittin has long been central to influencing the party’s direction.

The most spectacular symbol of Hannoverian power is von der Leyen’s career, which after her appointment to senior cabinet positions under Chancellor Angela Merkel culminated in her current tenure as president of the European Commission. Her rise to the top demonstrates how political skills developed in local politics can provide the basis for success at the highest levels of government.

The central role played by Lower Saxon networks in German politics will not necessarily last forever. Electoral gains for the far-right Alternative for Germany indicate that a radicalized part of the electorate has become fundamentally hostile to the openness to new social groups at the heart of the Lower Saxon model. After a disastrous election result last October, the region’s CDU is in a vulnerable position. Similar weaknesses within the Lower Saxon FDP have limited its influence, while among the SPD and Greens other regional groupings from Hessen, Bavaria, or Schleswig-Holstein contain parliamentarians willing to assert themselves against Hannoverian rivals.

The appointment of Pistorius as defense minister and Baerbock’s candidacy for chancellor may therefore mark more of a last hurrah for Lower Saxon influence than a sign of its invincibility. Yet the power of such regional networks should provide food for thought for observers of European politics who remain fixated on developments in a handful of national capitals. In decentralized societies such as Germany, power is distributed across two dozen cities in ways that make it essential to keep track of disputes and deals playing out among regional power brokers. More often than not, a quest to understand grand historical events requires getting off the train in a small city in Europe.