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A 33-year-old Social Democrat wants to prevent a “minority of assholes” from gaining control of the platform.
“Yesterday’s election results were shit”: This is how Bundestag member Robin Mesarosch (SPD) starts his TikTok video on the European elections. The 33-year-old has been a member of the Bundestag for his home region, the Zollernalb district and Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg, since 2021. He posts the speeches he gives there on TikTok and Co. The SPD politician’s reach has been growing for several months: to Instagram 27,000 people now follow him on Instagram and 24,000 people on TikTok.
Mesarosch is pleased that his videos are so well received. Also because it confirms his thesis that politicians do not have to do without content to be successful. His recipe for success: authenticity and emotions. “I don’t try to be the explainer bear in the Bundestag. I just do what I believe in,” says the Social Democrat. BuzzFeed News Germany from IPPEN.MEDIA.
What SPD politician Robin Mesarosch finds “absolutely terrible” on TikTok
He writes his own texts for the social media videos. That’s his thing, after all he used to be a poetry slammer. What he finds “absolutely terrible” are MP formats whose “crazy names usually contain alliteration”. “It’s a brutal distraction from the main point and usually nobody is interested,” says Mesarosch, who studied advertising, law, philosophy and history.
He joined the SPD at 18 and, after graduating from high school, worked for ten years for several MPs and the SPD federal executive board, including Andrea Nahles, Heiko Maas and Martin Schulz. During this time, he learned that “it is important how you get the issues across, how you build trust.” And that he “has to run for office himself if he wants to do it right.”
Politics cannot work without emotions, says the Swabian, and describes it as “completely disastrous” that Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) makes so little use of them. By this he does not mean to emotionalize against a group, as the AfD do. That is “populist, depending on the case, racist and always extremely dangerous. But I think it is incredibly important to allow someone who is politically active to be emotionally invested,” says Mesarosch.
This is an article by BuzzFeed News Germany. We are part of the IPPEN.MEDIAnetwork. Here you can find all contributions from BuzzFeed News Germany.
Young SPD politician on TikTok: “Authenticity is not a tactic”
He does not use emotions tactically, but “just feels it in the moment,” he says BuzzFeed News Germany“Authenticity is not a tactic. We are people, not talking advertising columns.” Politics must be different from classic advertising, and because it is not about “selling some completely irrelevant product,” that is easy. “We can talk about something that naturally affects everyone: politics. That is a huge advantage that we must use.”
What does he think of Olaf Scholz’s briefcase in this context? “It’s not what I imagine: that as Chancellor he would just sit down and say what’s going on. He can do that in the Bundestag faction too.” Mesarosch shows how this works in a TikTok about the construction of nuclear power plants. With 627,000 views, the video in which he points to a AfD-politician reacts, one of his most successful. “I don’t do TikTok because the AfD exists,” he clarifies. “But I also use it to refute the AfD’s arguments.”
AfD on TikTok: “It would be wrong to leave the field to the populists”
According to political scientist Kilian Hampel, the European election results show that the AfD “has managed to better appeal to young people and address their concerns in recent months.” This is because they do not traditionally vote for a party and therefore “have to be emotionally reached again and again,” believes Mesarosch.
Many who are politically active prefer to set up working groups that “nobody cares about” rather than trying to understand what concerns young people in particular. “This distance must be eliminated,” says Mesarosch BuzzFeed News Germany. “The Bismarck quote: ‘The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep’ – that no longer applies to many people. Especially young people.”
If there are so many profound changes in the world as in recent years, people want to know what is going on. “If the democratic parties don’t explain it to them, then the populists are immediately there with the simple answers. It would be wrong to leave the field to them,” says the Social Democrat. Above all, because TikTok plays into the hands of parties like the AfD, which are Spreading fake news.
“I want to regulate away this inequality of weapons when it comes to hate and objectivity, because it is just so stupid to stand by and watch how highly relevant social issues are negotiated on platforms where a minority of assholes prevail,” says the 33-year-old. “We don’t need to talk about how terribly complicated and tricky it can be to intervene. But you have to do it anyway.”
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