Peter Tschentscher: Hamburg's popular micro-manager

Hamburg's First Mayor likes to be around people. Not so much because he seeks closeness, enjoys contact with people. That is clearly not his passion. But because he wants to know the problems on the ground.

Winter election campaign at a weekly market in Hamburg. Tschentscher is appearing on this day with Wolfgang Schmidt, the Minister of the Chancellery. He wants to win the direct mandate for the Bundestag in Eimsbüttel. In the end, he doesn't succeed. The SPD loses three direct mandates in Hamburg in the Bundestag election, Schmidt loses to Till Steffen of the Greens.

But on this winter day in Eidelstedt, Schmidt is still in full election campaign mode. He hugs everyone when he arrives, including Tschentscher. The latter does not return the gesture. Schmidt is tall, laughs a lot, gets close to people, pats them on the shoulder. Tschentscher is rather small, keeps his distance, looks serious, listens for a long time before answering quietly and in great detail.

Following the votes in the Bundestag on migration, the state election campaign has become more intense. Now, around three weeks before the election, the leading candidates are only appearing with police protection, and federal issues dominate.

Unlike at the national level, however, the SPD is far ahead in Hamburg. In recent polls, it received 32 percent, the Greens 18. The CDU would receive 17 percent, the AfD 10 percent. Tschentscher can therefore continue pretty safely. At the end of the next legislative period, he would then be the longest-serving First Mayor of the Hanseatic city.

An astonishing success story. Tschentscher was only the third choice in the Hamburg SPD when Olaf Scholz moved to Berlin to become Federal Minister of Finance. But the others turned him down. And to the surprise of many, Tschentscher agreed. Since then, he has continued the coalition with the Greens fairly quietly and governs the city in his own unique way. He is obsessed with detail – and with great self-confidence.

During the election campaign, Tschentscher was asked what he would do if he had an absolute majority. He replied that he would tackle the issue of care and health. That would soon become a big issue. He himself had his "own internal sensor for issues" before they became big, he said later in the conversation. He knew "at least a year in advance" that the "climate wave" was coming, i.e. the protests for more climate protection.

In his view, many people around him only pretend to solve problems. "They all prefer to carry on doing what they have been doing for 30 years."

Tschentscher says this without any irony. His meticulousness and great self-confidence are said to sometimes get on his colleagues' nerves. Tschentscher's Senate Chancellery is a "bottleneck", they say. The flow of papers that need to be voted on comes to a halt there. Because the boss personally looks over them. And that takes time. He will certainly find a few areas that need to be improved. Delegating is not his strong point.

As the mayor of a city that will soon have two million inhabitants, this is astonishing. Does he micromanage too much and distrust his employees? Tschentscher denies this. But then he goes on to say that when he reads a file, "everything is perfect." In hierarchies, problems often do not reach the top. His department heads sometimes do not report them because they should actually solve them themselves. "You don't necessarily put hot topics under a mayor's nose."

That's why he has to go out to the people. Tschentscher calls it "cross-checking". He needs "detail knowledge". "You can't manage a city like that if you always just do things in the rough. It's always the little things that cause projects to fail." Those who remain in the rough, and there are many of them, usually don't want to work properly. Everyone would prefer to have a "breakfast director" at the top of the city. "But in the end, it all depends on me."

He is told "on a continuous basis" that something is not possible. Why, he asks. Most of the time, it is possible. Like with the third funding route for social housing that the city has introduced. Or with the dirty street signs that residents complain about. That's right, he found, they are all dirty. Now there is an agreement with the city cleaning service to clean the signs.

This is something the citizens like. If the mayor were directly elected, 44 percent of those surveyed would vote for him. If you accompany Tschentscher for a while, you will hear some people on the street say to him: It's good that you are in the SPD, otherwise I wouldn't vote for them anymore.

Hamburg has recently developed well in many areas, something even the opposition CDU does not deny. One expression of this is the new opera house in Hafencity, which Tschentscher proudly announced . "An opera house of world class", with the same appeal as the Elbphilharmonie. And all this just before the election. Economically, the Hanseatic city is prospering, even if the situation is getting gloomy.

The influx from outside is enormous, and the city does well in educational comparisons . Of course there are also problems. The many traffic jams, the crime at the main train station , the expensive apartments. But this is hardly attributed to the mayor.

During the election campaign, Tschentscher is trying to keep his distance from Berlin and the broken traffic light coalition. He is distancing himself from the disputes. At the same time, he says defensively that the problems are also facing a new government, and that the world situation is difficult. But the medical graduate gets emotional on one point. He considers the legalization of cannabis to be extremely dangerous, especially for younger people. Perhaps after the federal election there will be an opportunity to abolish it again.

Tschentscher would like to continue with the Greens, and he says so – without completely ruling out other coalitions. "The Greens are exaggerating on some issues," and they need to be "put under the bus, otherwise they'll run away." We saw that with the heating law, for example. The tenor: In Hamburg, the put under the bus works very well.

Unlike at the federal level, the alliance manages without public disputes. Cooperation with Hamburg's second mayor, the Science Senator Katharina Fegebank from the Greens, works well. Perhaps this is because she has a very different temperament. Fegebank seems friendly, Tschentscher sometimes eccentric. But it is certainly also helpful that the Greens in Hamburg are very pragmatic when it comes to content.

Tschentscher, on the other hand, has a hard time with the Hamburg CDU. "I simply don't know how things are going to work with this CDU," he said during a "trial" of the top candidates . He clashed with CDU leader Dennis Thering, sometimes quite heatedly, accusing him of making false statements. Thering likes to lash out against the red-green coalition, accusing the coalition of failure in areas such as security and transport policy.

In personal conversations with people on the street, the Hamburg CDU leader is different, friendly and listens. He has led the CDU in the city since last year and, together with his predecessor Christoph Ploß, has united and rebuilt it after difficult years.

But unlike at the national level, his party is actually behind the Greens in the polls. Why? Hamburg is a big city, says Thering. And the CDU is coming out of a deep valley. In the last state election, it only received eleven percent.

Thering can now only appear in the election campaign with protection. He comes to the event at a market with four police officers and two bodyguards. Friedrich Merz 's initiative has made the election campaign much more difficult, according to the CDU information stand in the pedestrian zone. Then there is Angela Merkel's "foul". This has made the atmosphere much more emotional and enlivened the political opponents.

In Hamburg, too, thousands demonstrated against the acceptance of support for the AfD ; suddenly everyone is against the CDU. The local CDU member of parliament, Silke Seif, says that since the vote in the Bundestag, posters have been constantly being defaced and destroyed, she has to go out every evening with cable ties and new posters, and her family is worried about her safety.

The mood is heated, says Thering. Unfortunately, he now speaks a lot with citizens about federal issues, less about Hamburg. Thering supports Merz in terms of content, but makes it clear that he has little faith in his approach to the AfD in the Bundestag. Despite everything, he is trying to spread optimism in the election campaign, believes that a "turnaround" has been achieved and that the Greens are within striking distance.

Tschentscher has been engaged in his own personal election campaign for years. He regularly appears at so-called "Tschentscher Live" events in the city's districts. He stands at the front of restaurants and meeting rooms, for example, and anyone can come and ask questions.

The mayor answers in detail and at length, as always. "Here I get a sense of the mood," says Tschentscher. People speak up for their neighbors. And they don't want their problems to be solved immediately, but are happy if they are noticed.

Tschentscher also listened a lot to the port workers in Wilhelmsburg on the evening of the election campaign. The port works group of the SPD workers' association invited them to kale with smoked pork and bacon. Dock workers from various companies, including many works council members, were sitting at around 20 large round tables. The mood was mixed.

Hamburg does live from the port, but it depends on economic development. And the importance of the location is declining in international comparison. Then there is automation and digitalization, which are turning everything upside down. And then there are the Greens in Tschentscher's government, who often give the impression that the large port areas could actually be used for much better things than loading mundane containers.

Tschentscher praises the port and its employees. Nothing would work in Germany without the port. Every second television in the country and three out of five packets of coffee come into the country this way. Since he has governed the city, the Senate has promoted the port much more than before. No other party is as sure of the port as the SPD, says Tschentscher. And as far as the future and the supposedly dwindling importance of the port are concerned, people should "not let themselves be confused", the "container counting" is nonsense.

Then questions follow. They are about the lack of appreciation for long-serving employees, the deepening of the Elbe, lengthy planning applications and childcare. Tschentscher answers in detail, most extensively on the planning applications. He says he can say how long it will take for each individual district, and goes into more detail.

That was a "somewhat more complex answer," he says at the end, but if someone says off the cuff that everything is done so quickly, one has to be suspicious.