Mainly Europe (daily newspaper Junge Welt)

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A French woman, an Italian and a German meet and form a party. What sounds like the beginning of a joke is actually the story of the founding of the Volt party, which will run for the first time in a federal election in September – if you believe its website. The Italian Andrea Venzon, the French Colombe Cahen-Salvador and the German Damian Boeselager could not have watched the Brexit vote in June 2016 in Great Britain and the “growing right-wing populism” in Europe, it said. And so »with Volt they created a cross-border political approach for Europe in order to find new, pragmatic and progressive answers to the challenges of our time«.

First mandates

In fact, the young trio launched Volt Europa on March 29, 2017, the day on which Great Britain officially launched the process of leaving the EU by notifying the European Council. The founders seem to have loved symbolism. As the name of the party, they chose the international unit of measurement for voltage – to symbolize “new energy” with this term, which is known throughout Europe. In March 2018, Volt Germany was founded as the first national section. There are now 16 national Volt parties and “teams” in more than 30 countries, with more than 25,000 members and supporters, around 2,800 in Germany.

Embodying the pan-European idea like no other party did not help Volt Germany in the European elections in May 2019. With around 250,000 votes, which corresponds to 0.7 percent, it fell short of its own expectations, but was able to win a seat in the European Parliament, which went to party co-founder Damian Boeselager. In the state election in Hamburg 2020, Volt stood for the first time in a German state election and came up with 1.3 percent. In the local elections in Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia in 2020 and in Hesse in 2021, the party won city council mandates in various cities.

Technocratic understanding

For Volt, the key to everything is the EU. It strives for a European unification with the goal of a European republic including its own “defense army”. Behind Volt’s utterances, a technocratic understanding of politics can be seen that consistently fades out social contradictions. It is probably no coincidence that on the posters for the federal election the party color combined violet with red, sometimes with green and sometimes with yellow.

From a “good home”

Programmatically, the party is somewhere between Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen, SPD and FDP. In terms of climate change, people tend to advocate green demands such as a speed limit on motorways, while social policy tends to advocate left-wing demands such as more consistent taxation of inheritance and a minimum wage of 13 euros. But a lot in the program also sounds like FDP. Bureaucracy must be dismantled and corporate tax rates lowered “towards a middle European level,” it says. There is a lot of talk about innovation, startups and entrepreneurship.

This is no coincidence, as the party is primarily anchored in the milieu of aspiring students – often from a »good family« – and in demand among young start-up entrepreneurs. Party co-founder Boeselager and the co-chairman of Volt Germany, Paul Loeper, can be seen as prototypes. According to Wikipedia, Boeselager is the son of a Frankfurt banker. After graduating from high school, he studied philosophy and economics at the University of Bayreuth. He was also at Columbia University in New York and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, worked for the notorious management consultant McKinsey for three years. Loeper studied business administration in Berlin and has a Masters in Global Security from Glasgow University. Apparently he is a relative of Claus von Loeper, the former head of the Hannover Finanz group. At least Claus von Loeper is listed as a donor to the party.

Rich sponsors

It is revealing that Volt Europa lists the “Open Society Initiative for Europe” of the US billionaire George Soros with 19,191 euros and the entrepreneur Christian Oldendorff, son of the Hamburg shipowner Klaus E. Oldendorff, as the two largest donors. Andrej Hunko, European policy spokesman for the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag, suspects that the party has enough financial resources. “This is also supported by the fact that they hung up plenty of posters here in my hometown of Aachen,” he said on Friday jW. Volt reminds him of the “Puls of Europe” movement founded in Frankfurt am Main in 2016. “The party seems to be a touch to the left than Pulse of Europe, but this basic principle, this very idealized image of the EU, you can also find that at Volt,” said Hunko. The party’s demands, such as those for a European army, amounted to de-democratization.

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