The Green politician with plans for Germany's ex-capital

Katja Dörner is Bonn's first Green mayor, and one of the first women mayors anywhere in Germany representing the ecologist party. Her battle with incumbent Ashok Sridharan, a member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) who has familial roots in India, was deceptively clearcut in the end: Dörner won the runoff with 56% of the vote.

After spending roughly a decade representing Bonn in the German Parliament in Berlin, Dörner had chosen to return to the former capital full time.

"It's become increasingly clear to me in recent years that the really central questions — whether the transportation revolution succeeds, whether we really can manage to provide affordable housing — these things are decided at the local level," she said.

The 44-year-old is part of a broader surge for the Green party, which currently looks set to become the second-strongest power in German politics when parliamentary elections take place next year.

Having campaigned on the slogan "Bonn needs a change," Dörner has many ideas that she hopes can be realized fairly quickly when her term begins in November. She has plans for a citizen's assembly to discuss ideas on how to achieve the goal of net-zero emissions by 2035, "a solar power-panel offensive," and protected bike lanes for the congested city center, as well as more affordable housing in a university city with some of the highest rental prices anywhere in Germany.

"My impression is that the things I and we Greens stand for — let's say climate change, a transport revolution, but also social solidarity in the city — are topics that have reached a broad base in society," Dörner said. She downplayed the idea of the balance of power shifting in a city that has always been a curious dichotomy, even when it was the West German capital; it is prosperous, leafy and conservative in its suburbs, but it's also a highly diverse university town home to major international employers like the United Nations.

Spurred to act by xenophobia

The current Green party constituency office is located in the heart of Bonn's old town, a stone's throw from a popular restaurant and bar that are usually teeming, coronavirus permitting.

The graffiti-plastered area, still able to support alternative bookshops, feels like the Greens' classic base. It is highly popular with students, multicultural and has a real estate market dominated by younger renters. Bikes and electric scooters litter the sidewalks, including a cluster right outside the Greens' office door.

Dörner first moved to Bonn as a student in 1995, so arguably after its heyday, since Germany had reunified and the official capital was once again Berlin. She warns against overstating the city's decline, though, recalling how in the 90s people feared that it was time to board up the city center, "and yet that did not come to pass at all."

Germany's migration debate of that era, which led to the right to asylum being anchored in Germany's Constitution, first put her on the path to city hall. She describes her distaste at seeing far-right attacks in towns and cities across the country, such as Mölln, Hoyerswerda and Solingen. "Fires were being laid, people were dying, yet somehow we were still having this 'the boat is full' discussion in parallel, and that really did politicize me," she said.

She sees some parallels to that era today in German politics, after years of debate over Merkel's response to the so-called migration crisis of 2015 and amid the rise of the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) in national politics.

Most recently, the fire at the Moria refugee camp, on the Greek isle of Lesbos, stirred the memories. She says she was "very angry" when Bonn did not join an open petition from 10 city mayors to Germany Interior Minister Horst Seehofer saying that they had the capacity and willingness to take in people from the camp.

"Bonn wasn't part of it. That cannot stand. It will change under a new mayor!"

'I knew no other besides Helmut Kohl'

Dörner herself joined the Greens in the wave of euphoria after their last great national triumph: the 1998 parliamentary election, when the party first won a place alongside the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) as a junior coalition partner. Here, too, her greatest joy does not seem to have been in the prospect of a more stringent waste recycling routine, but rather in the ousting of a longstanding conservative chancellor.

"I said to myself, 'I want to be a part of that, part of this new awakening,'" she recalled. "You have to think of it this way: For 16 years, for practically my whole life — my whole life while I could pay attention and learn about such things — there had been Chancellor Helmut Kohl [of the conservative CDU]. I knew no other. It was simply brilliant when he was voted out."

Another long-lived CDU chancellor is now making way, and who will come after Merkel remains something of a riddle for German politics.

But polls for next year's election currently suggest the Greens are gunning for their best-ever showing at the national level. This week the party polled at 21%, five points ahead of the Social Democrats.

Facing coalition talks of her own in Bonn, Dörner sidestepped all questions about the Green party's future. With one exception: It's "clear" that the Greens have "no basis for cooperation with the AfD," she said, before carefully leaving every other door wide open.