The living environments of people in the country and in the city differ from each other. Political scientist Lukas Haffert sees growing potential for conflict in the urban-rural divide. He also explains the big problem of the Greens.
FOCUS online: Mr. Haffert, do you live in the city or in the country?
Lukas Haffert: I work at the University of Zurich. By Swiss standards, I live in the biggest city you can live in.
So you’re a city person.
Haffert: With the job I have chosen, you almost inevitably live in the city. So yes – but I also feel comfortable in the city.
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In your book “Stadt, Land, Frust” you describe the urban-rural divide as “one of the defining political lines of conflict of our time”. What do you mean?
Haffert: That has several dimensions. The most visible is certainly that election results in the city and in the country differ more today than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
For example, you might ask: If I want to predict how a person will vote, but I can only know one characteristic of that person, which characteristic is the most meaningful? Of course, income is a hot candidate, or the level of education. But now the place of residence is also very meaningful. This is the first level.
However, one defining line of conflict also means that the political debate is conducted along this line. This is the second dimension. City versus country is becoming an increasingly important paradigm for political issues: parties discuss politics through this contrast and voters interpret it through this lens.
You also note in your book that the political conflict between town and country is becoming ever more acute.
Haffert: That’s right. The fact that town and country are drifting further and further apart has something to do with changes in the economic structure. In Germany, cities are not rich per se and rural regions are not inherently poor. However, they differ from each other in the way in which they generate wealth.
In the cities, services dominate, especially the creative sector and universities, while the importance of industry has declined sharply. This means that prosperity in cities is increasingly acquired intangible. It is based on knowledge, innovations, ideas. In rural areas, prosperity depends even more on the classic export industry, such as machine builders and suppliers for the automotive industry.
Linked to these economic differences is the fact that the people who work in the different sectors of the economy differ in their values, attitudes and worldviews.
Lukas Haffert is Senior Assistant at the Chair of Comparative Political Economy at the University of Zurich. Since 2018 he has been a member of the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In his book “Stadt, Land, Frust” Haffert attempts a “political survey” of the country.
So the common city guy has different priorities in life than the common country guy.
Haffert: So to speak. Someone who works in Berlin, Cologne or Munich has often studied and probably completed a semester abroad during their studies. He has a cosmopolitan, pro-European, liberal view of the world. This attitude is usually reinforced by the people he works with.
In rural areas, in the manufacturing industry, such biographies are rare. More people are working there in apprenticeships or have completed dual studies. They are more tied to the place where they work and more often see themselves as down-to-earth and connected to their homeland.
So it happens that the differences between town and country are particularly evident in questions of value and not in classic economic issues. Am I for or against immigration? How do I feel about further deepening of European integration?
City, country, frustration: A political survey
Which brings us back to politics. How does the typical country person vote? And where does the typical city dweller put his cross?
Haffert: In principle, voters have always tended towards the left in cities and more conservative voters in rural areas. When answering this question, however, one should not overlook the fact that there are also major differences within the two types, for example between the city centers and the outskirts.
That’s why it makes more sense to look at the party strongholds. The Greens have their strongholds in the city centers, the SPD also in the cities, but more in the outskirts. The CDU has its strongholds in rural areas in western Germany, the AfD in rural areas in eastern Germany.
You haven’t even mentioned the FDP yet.
Haffert: Yes, the FDP is an interesting case. Of all the parties represented in the Bundestag, the population density of the FDP is the least helpful in predicting election results. In the general election, however, she did extremely well with young people in rural areas. But that was more of an outlier, there is no stable pattern like the Greens.
Do you have any guess as to why?
Haffert: I have to speculate on that. It could be that this has something to do with the pandemic. Perhaps the feeling that young people had to give up in favor of older people was even more pronounced in rural areas. And the FDP was a party that criticized the federal government’s corona policy. But it could also have something to do with the fact that the FDP has put a lot of emphasis on the topic of digitization. This is particularly important for young people in rural areas.
Are there parties that benefit from the urban-rural divide?
Haffert: The Greens and the AfD benefit from this at the ballot box, because you are the most clearly positioned in this contrast. When politics is carried out as a conflict between town and country, that plays into their hands.
So the Greens are fine with being classified as a townspeople party.
Haffert: No, not at all. They are very explicitly striving to broaden their electoral base and gain support in rural areas as well. So far they have hardly been able to do that. In contrast, the AfD is a party that likes to emphasize the contrast between town and country. She builds on anti-urban resentments, uses them and consciously exacerbates them.
Again and again one reads that rural regions feel left behind. Are traffic lights failing rural residents?
Haffert: In any case, many people perceive it that way. For the sake of fairness, however, one has to say that it was no different in 16 years of the Union-led federal government. And if you only look at the distribution of state funds, it is not easy to judge whether the feeling is justified.
In this respect, the impression of being politically left behind is probably also closely related to which topics are discussed at all. Rural issues rarely make it onto the agenda here. For example, housing is discussed from a strong urban perspective, which is primarily about rents.
But if that is how it is perceived, the governments have done something wrong.
Haffert: It’s not that easy for politicians to avoid focusing on urban issues. The vast majority of members of parliament these days have studied, i.e. spent a formative phase of life in a city, and they also spend a large part of their time in Berlin. Of course, this influences which topics are present. I would say it’s more of a silent dynamic than a conscious decision to avoid rural issues.
Is that why the Greens are considered the party of cities?
Haffert: In any case, it has a lot to do with questions of representation. It is not difficult for the Greens to make programmatic proposals from which rural areas would benefit. But they lack representatives who give people the feeling: he’s like me, he talks like us, he comes from here. Not only do they have a tremendously urban voter base, they also have a tremendously urban membership base. That’s her big problem.
What would a credible representative of the Greens look like?
Haffert: Just like Winfried Kretschmann.
For real?
Haffert: His state association has succeeded in broadening the electoral base in rural Baden-Württemberg. He did what other Greens want.
And how did he do it?
Haffert: I don’t live in Baden-Württemberg. But it seems to me that he presents himself very believably as someone who shares the down-to-earth, home-loving self-image of many people in the country, for example when he presents himself as a do-it-yourselfer with a workshop in his own basement. But that is probably also possible because he is 30 years older than the federal political protagonists of the Greens. In this respect, it certainly cannot simply be copied.
It seems as if city and country people are becoming more and more alienated from each other.
Haffert: In any case, this alienation is stronger in young people than in old people. Younger people are more likely to think that people in the country have a very different lifestyle than those in the city. If this perception does not wash away with aging, the alienation could increase further.
Would you say that the Ukraine war and its aftermath are fueling the conflict between town and country?
Haffert: The Ukraine conflict shows very well that the urban-rural divide has become a lens through which a great deal is interpreted. It was immediately said: the fuel discount is politics for the country, the nine-euro ticket is politics for the city.
This may mean that the Ukraine war is actually fueling the urban-rural conflict. But it can also mean that it has already established itself so strongly as a pattern of interpretation that the Ukraine war is fitted there. At least there is some evidence that the effects of the war are felt differently in town and country.
In what way?
Haffert: I think two things are relevant here. If we come back to the economic structure, then the high energy prices are a particular threat to energy-intensive industry, on which more jobs in rural regions depend.
If the Ukraine war jeopardizes the future of German industry, that’s less of a problem for the economic model of big cities. On the other hand, of course, the energy consumption of private households also differs. In this respect, there is a real contradiction behind the argument about the nine-euro ticket and the fuel discount.
