Regional Politics

There is a great piece via HR (my regional HR public TV network) today on Frankfurt, and the trappings of a metropolitan city.

For those who've never been to Frankfurt....I would classify in the category similar to Chicago.  It's a business city, which saw rapid growth since 1900, and today sits at roughly 740,000 residents within it's city border.  If you include the near-by areas of Wiesbaden, Mainz, Offenbach, Hanau, and Darmstadt....you'd be talking about three million people within a 30-minute drive of Frankfurt.  It's figured that that roughly a million people transit each day to work within Frankfurt.  Toss in the banking sector, industry, and the airport....Frankfurt in some ways is the driving engine of a major part of the German success story.

So HR looked at this trend with Frankfurt.  Most everyone will now say that traffic for the city is becoming a major problem, and that affordable housing is almost non-existent within the city.

If you were working-class and looking for reasonable rent....you'd have to go and look 30 kilometers outside of the city, and plan on riding the railway into work each day.  People complain about this strategy and being forced to live beyond the city.

Politically, this draws all of the political parties in an election to some stance of talking about solutions and fixing the mess.  Promises are made, and rarely kept.  All of this remembered each four years, and repeated for the general Hessen state election every five years.

The voting trend in Frankfurt?  In 2013, the last big national election, the CDU took around 52-percent of the vote in Frankfurt, with the SPD coming to almost half that number.  The Greens barely took 8-percent in that vote.  Darmstadt played out a different situation....with the SPD taking a win with 37-percent vote while the CDU took 36-percent of the vote.

The problem here is really a regional problem that goes beyond just Frankfurt itself, and touches on both Hessen and Rhineland Pfalz.  Frankfurt's urbanization issue has grown to such a pace that it's beyond one city council to handle or repair.

Oddly, the entertainment landscape, the local sports scene, the airport, the connections via the Frankfurt railway system, and the world-class local train network all make the city a very attractive place to live.  Toss in a hyped up education system throughout the entire region....and a large international population, and you've got one of the more dynamic cities of Germany.