Hesse: Mayor election in Kassel: who conquers the executive chair in the town hall?

So far there are five official candidates for the mayoral election in Kassel on March 12th.

Hesse: Mayor election in Kassel: who conquers the executive chair in the town hall?

So far there are five official candidates for the mayoral election in Kassel on March 12th. Including incumbent Christian Geselle. However, after an internal power struggle within the party, the SPD politician is running as an independent candidate.

Kassel (dpa / lhe) - Who will conquer the executive chair in Kassel's town hall? So far, five candidates have thrown their hats in the ring for the March 12 election, including the incumbent Social Democrat mayor, Christian Geselle. The 46-year-old is aiming for a second term, but is running as an independent candidate after internal party disputes. With Isabel Carqueville, the SPD is sending its own candidate into the race.

The rift running through the party is deep. After the coalition of SPD and Greens burst in the northern Hessian city in June, months of internal disputes ensued among the Social Democrats. The party initially started coalition talks with the CDU, but later decided to break them off by a majority - against the will of Lord Mayor Geselle. In protest against the decision, several elected representatives resigned from their posts in the SPD, including party vice president Rosa-Maria Hamacher and co-chairman of the parliamentary group Wolfgang Decker. Geselle later announced in an open letter that he would no longer run as an SPD candidate in the mayoral election, but as an independent candidate.

The SPD is now striving for the exclusion of Geselle from the party. The spokesman for the Kassel Social Democrats, Peter Carqueville, who spoke with Isabel Carqueville, explained that four local groups had asked the sub-district of Kassel and the district of North Hesse to set up an investigative commission for Geselle's candidacy against SPD candidate Carqueville or to initiate party order proceedings against the incumbent mayor is married. "There will be a party order procedure to exclude Christian Geselle from the SPD."

The party refers to paragraph 6 of the organizational statute of the SPD. Among other things, it stipulates that membership in the SPD is incompatible with running for an election against a candidate nominated by the SPD. "The allegation will be submitted to a subdistrict arbitration panel for a decision," Carqueville said. A decision is not expected before the March election.

According to the political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder, however, Geselle will not be expelled from the party. "The Kassel SPD is divided," said the politics professor from the University of Kassel. It would not be one person against the entire party, but two camps would oppose each other. "A not inconsiderable part of the party will be campaigning for the incumbent mayor. That would mean that they would all have to be excluded."

Schroeder refers to the outcome of two comparable party organization proceedings in Witten and Bad Oeynhausen (both North Rhine-Westphalia). In both cases, the party executive stated that the structural split in a party cannot be pinned down to one person and that one should pull oneself together. "Such a split cannot be resolved through legal proceedings, but only through communication," said Schroeder.

The political scientist sees the main reason for the rift within the Kassel SPD as a generational conflict. Geselle's supporters are predominantly experienced elected officials. It was mainly younger party members who opposed him, who were pushing for changes.

For the SPD it is important to resolve the dispute. "Intra-party competition and conflicts that are not properly resolved lead to negative resonance for the party concerned," explained Schroeder. "That could be the end of the hegemony of the Social Democrats in Kassel." The North Hessian city has been firmly in the hands of the Social Democrats since the end of the Second World War, with the exception of the years 1993 to 2005 under CDU politician Georg Lewandowski.

In addition to Geselle and Carqueville, Hesse's former justice minister, Eva Kühne-Hörmann, is aiming for the CDU to move into Kassel's town hall. Also nominated are Sven Schoeller (Green Party) and Violetta Bock (Left Party). The deadline for further nominations ends on January 2nd. With currently five candidates, the competitive situation in this election campaign is comparatively good, according to political scientist Schroeder. "All applicants are currently very present in an election campaign that has an impact on society and has so far been fair."

With Kühne-Hörmann and Schoeller, two of the candidates are now faced with the challenge of continuing to govern Kassel's town hall together despite the election campaign. Because it was only in December that the Greens, CDU and FDP signed a coalition agreement. After the failure of the red-green town hall coalition in June, there is now a Jamaican alliance in the northern Hessian city for the first time.

If none of the candidates achieve an absolute majority in the first ballot on March 12th, the two candidates with the most votes will go to the runoff on March 26th.

In addition to the citizens of Kassel, the citizens of two other Hessian cities will also decide on their town hall boss this year. In Frankfurt, the election of the mayor would have taken place in 2024. After Peter Feldmann (SPD) was voted out of office, the city will now call the ballot box on March 5, 2023. In Darmstadt, the next direct election of the mayor will take place on March 19.