Interview with Maximilian Oehl (Brand New Bundestag)

Brand New Bundestag advocates for progressive policies in Germany.

Maximilian Oehl of Brand New Bundestag spoke with Jessica Kantor on April 13, 2023. Click here to read the full conversation with insights highlighted.

Jessica Kantor: Can you please introduce yourself, your role in your organization and the problem that you’re working to address?

Maximilian Oehl: I’m Maximilian Oehl. I’m the co-initiate and executive director of Brand New Bundestag. We are working to make politics more accessible and to change the power dynamics in political institutions.

Jessica Kantor: How exactly do you work to address that?

Maximilian Oehl: Our organization has three pillars. The first pillar is we scout and support progressive diverse candidates and help them win internal party nominations so that they actually have a chance to enter political office. The second pillar is we maintain a cross-party network of progressive members of parliament from the left party to the conservative party. It’s a multi-party system and brings them together at eye level, also with people from civil society, so that they can strategize together. A third pillar is that we work with volunteers. We have hundreds of volunteers that work in our organization and who are mostly young people between 16 and 28. Many of them are from underrepresented communities that are active in this nonpartisan grassroots organization. Through that, they learn what it means to be active politically and to run for office.

Jessica Kantor: How do you connect with individuals? Is it all in person, is it virtual? Are you using specific platforms?

Maximilian Oehl: We started in early 2020, which was why we mostly built the organization digitally and a lot of our work runs through Zoom and Slack. Slack is really the backbone of our organization. We typically meet people first online and then if we decide to take them on as candidates, of course we also have personal meetings and gather them for workshops and so on. I would say probably digital first, but then it turns into a hybrid mode of collaboration.

Jessica Kantor: How are you measuring success?

Maximilian Oehl: There are different factors. For one, we look at the number of MPs that we bring to the parliament. The other is the number of pieces of legislation that we influence. Our theory of change is focused on getting political parties to start doing a very conscious way of training their personnel and finding new political leadership. Whenever we see instances of people within the parties or political chapters, regional chapters and so on, reacting to our approach, this is another indicator of success for us. For example, there are now people that are regional presidents of their political parties who say their main role is to make sure that we get the best possible people to run for office, which is a different perception than in a power logic where someone with high ambitions would try to make sure to build up a network that will carry this person to the highest possible position.

Jessica Kantor: How many MPs have you put through? What evidence do you have that you are making progress?

Maximilian Oehl: In the federal elections in 2021, we supported 11 people and four made it to the parliament. In addition to that, we compiled a list of the top 50 progressive candidates that are also part of our community. Out of these 50 people, 30 made it to the parliament and this is the network that we are still curating and working with on the federal level. In addition to that, we were active last year in three state legislature elections where, out of the 10 people that we supported, three people made it to three different state legislatures. This year we are supporting around 30 candidates in three different state legislature elections that will happen later this year.

Jessica Kantor: What do you think makes your approach distinctive?

Maximilian Oehl: We intervene in the functioning of party politics. This is different from other organizations that focus on political leadership training or things like that because we aim to build up this kind of network within political parties and bridge the sectors of civil society activism and political engagement. This is related to the work that we do with our candidates, but also when it comes to the political platform that we as a civil society actor claim for ourselves to be building up this parliamentary platform. This is something that is quite new because usually this would be a realm where only political parties are active, but we go there, we build up this platform and we have MPs that come to us and want to use the platform for their own political purposes. This is, I think, a distinctive trait.

Jessica Kantor: Can you share an example of something that illustrates your impact?

Maximilian Oehl: One example was the one that I mentioned earlier, where the president of a regional chapter of a political party now says, “It’s not my ambition to become the most powerful person this party, but it’s my responsibility as the president to make sure we find the best possible candidates, which also means that we have diverse representation and we have adequate representation so that all the communities in Germany feel represented in our party.” This is one measure of success.

Another example is when we see pieces of legislation that are influenced by the statements that we put out. For example, there was a big gas subsidy scheme in order to keep consumer prices low in Germany where people invested. The government basically made available €200 billion to subsidize a huge scheme and we were able to make sure that there’s some redistributive justice element in this mechanism so that people with higher incomes don’t get additional tax deductions for the subsidies that they have received, but people with lower incomes do. That’s one example where we successfully influenced legislation to have a sort of redistribution mechanism.

Another example involves the nationwide public transport ticket in Germany, which costs €49 per month. There had first been a model project for €9 per month and, through our work, we made sure that there would be a successor for this kind of ticket. Now it’s a permanent €49 per month ticket and you can use all the public transport in Germany. It’s measured, of course, in terms of consumer behavior, driving it more towards low emission behaviors and to help consumers now in this price crisis and time of inflation.

Jessica Kantor: What are some lessons that you’ve learned about things that didn’t necessarily work? I only ask you this so that others can perhaps learn from the lessons that you’ve already learned.

Maximilian Oehl: What is challenging with our approach is that we are trying to transcend these borders between civil society and party politics. This sometimes comes at the cost that you fall in a gap where people support you being part of the network, but there is the issue of funding. In the funding context, in Germany at least, there’s a lot of funding for typical political education or typical democracy awareness work or campaigns, but there’s not really any money for this kind of work that is trying to bridge civil society and party politics. Private foundations in Germany often say we have to leave this to political parties because they are the ones that are competent to be active in this area. But of course they are not the ones that will innovate themselves, so the disruption needs to come from elsewhere. If there’s no funding for this kind of activity, it will be difficult to sustain it.

We’ve had a hard time attracting bigger funding and we’ve learned a lesson that only very progressive, smaller foundations are the ones that will help us grow. It’s easier for us to fundraise from private individuals than from bigger institutional donors, for example. This is one thing.

Another challenge is related to the people that we brought to the parliament. They are always in this tension between their party alliance and their alliance to us or their self-identification with the civil society. Sometimes you can leave the impression, “Well, okay, now they’re only focusing on their political career and they don’t care about us anymore.” Sometimes we are in a position where we need to pull them out of this logic and say, “Hey, we are still here and remember we supported you.” This is a tension that is always tangible.

Jessica Kantor: Are there any other challenges that you haven’t been able to solve aside from funding?

Maximilian Oehl: There is a struggle to keep people associated with the methodology that we use and have them self identify as members of civil society. That’s of course like an ongoing kind of operational task for us, I would say. But other than funding, I think we’re now getting ready to scale our project. While funding is one of the greatest challenges, it’s not even something that I would say is an obstacle for us to scale because we are now pursuing a strategy where we are building up local chapters and are focusing also on small donations.

Jessica Kantor: Are you working towards advancing systems level change?

Maximilian Oehl: I would say so. We are challenging the way that political personnel are being selected. We are also challenging the self-perception of MPs in democratically elected parliaments. We do this work with the end goal in mind that we create democratic habits and a democratic culture that allows us to be fit for the big transformations that we need to achieve. In our view, the system that we have in place right now, the democratic system that we have in place, is very good at gradually improving the fossil-based industrial system that has brought about a lot of wealth, but so far, it hasn’t proven to be very effective in changing paradigms. In our view, we need to rethink how democracy works and what the self-perceptions of people are that hold positions of power in democracy so that we are able to transform. This is the systemic change that we have in mind, so ideally at some point we will have a democratic system that is fit for transformation.

Jessica Kantor: What do you think is needed from other actors in that situation in order for that to happen?

Maximilian Oehl: In Germany politics is like a membership based system. We don’t have public primaries, so the members of political parties, the delegates, have a lot of control over who in the end gets to run for office. We need to continue to see a willingness to cooperate with us and to cooperate with actors from civil society, from the people that are active in the political parties. We need civil society to be very pragmatic in the way that they collaborate and interact with politics, and not be too ideological and not be too aggressive, because the big transformation in our view requires a trans-sectoral corporation. Politics alone can’t do it, civil society alone can’t do it, business alone can’t do it. We need to all come together.

We need this kind of strategic pragmatism and we also need progressive future-oriented actors to agree on some sort of common ground in terms of the policy targets that we are pursuing. This is why we are working with policy targets that we have set and we say, “Well, all the people that we support and all the people that are part of our community, we all agree that these are the positions, these are the targets that we need to reach in order to arrive at a future fit society.” I think we need to have the broadest possible base in society in order to be able to really master this challenge of transformation.

Jessica Kantor: You already shared a little bit about where your organization is heading, but do you want to talk about any other ways that your work is hoping to evolve over the next five years?

Maximilian Oehl: For us, now, the challenge is to scale nationwide. People are approaching us from other European countries, and from the global south, that are very interested in these approaches because of course, the German democratic system is comparatively stable and well-functioning, and not a big money game in Germany. I think there are a lot of other democratic systems that can benefit from this kind of concept and this kind of approach. We’re of course interested in continuing to support people that come from civil society and want to build something similar like this in their home country.

I’m a fellow, and the idea behind the fellowship is to spread the idea and to share it open source and to help people replicate these structures elsewhere. Ideally in the near future, we will have not just 30, but rather hundreds of MPs in the German parliament that identify with this policy agenda and ideally can play a substantial role in pushing the transformation we all need.

Jessica Kantor: For the sake of this conversation, academics, journalists, other social innovators, learning from what you’ve already built, is there anything else that you want to cover in this conversation that we didn’t get to talk about?

Maximilian Oehl: I’ve touched upon it already, but for me it’s important to emphasize that we need to revisit our political culture if we want to see transformative change because a lot of the theories of change that we are pursuing or that civil society is pursuing, that if you dominate the discourse, eventually you will see the legislative change because the discourse is being nominated. Especially when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, we’ve seen a heavily dominated public discourse, at least in Germany, by the climate justice movement. But we haven’t seen the deep transformative legislative change. We need to think more about how we can connect these spheres, the civil society sphere and the political sphere, and how we can be as effective and as fast as possible in effectuating that transformation.

I think some people from academia or from bigger institutions are sometimes a bit hesitant to say we need to revisit democracy or the way that our politics work. Of course, the constitution ensures some sort of stability, but I think it would be rather dangerous to hesitate to engage with it because we need to think about what culture and what habits still serve their purpose and which ones are not productive in this phase of transformation that we are now in.

Jessica Kantor: Thank you so much for sharing all of your insight.

Click here to read the full conversation with insights highlighted.

Jessica Kantor is an independent journalist specializing in health, human rights, and social impact. Her work can be found in Fast Company, Healthcare Quarterly, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, and others. She is a living kidney donor.

* This interview has been edited and condensed.

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