Elections loom, but the Ahr valley has little interest

Two months after 133 people died in floods, residents of stricken western German region say they feel abandoned by politicians

When she heard on the radio just weeks after floods had devastated her family-run restaurant and her home town that German authorities no longer classed it as a disaster zone, Paddy Amanatidis felt like she had been punched in the stomach.

“It’s hard to be told that everything is supposedly OK when you have no electricity, no clean water, no heating,” she said. It is now almost two months since western Germany experienced catastrophic flooding after the River Ahr – a tributary of the Rhine – rose by seven metres and enveloped everything as it spread far beyond its banks. At least 133 people died in the Ahr valley alone, and about 50 more elsewhere.

Amanatidis recently stood in the courtyard of her restaurant, La Perla, in the town of Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, coordinating efforts by the staff, friends and family to build a new patio.

“For the time being we’re mixing concrete rather than pizza dough,” she joked. They have removed 40 tonnes of detritus from the restaurant. “Mud, sludge and rubble, full of faecal matter. I came out in a rash. I and my sister wept when we realised we couldn’t rescue the pizza oven that my father installed 40 years ago.”

While the mud and water has now largely been cleared, a desolate landscape remains. Owners of buildings reduced to shells wait to hear if they can be rebuilt or must be pulled down. Railway tracks are suspended like rope ladders where hillsides slipped into the valley and huge tips dot the landscape. About 42,000 people were affected, many losing their homes.

But the reconstruction operation is in full swing, the air thrumming with generators and dehumidifiers, the thud of jackhammers and diggers. A €30bn ($35bn) rescue fund was approved by the Bundestag last week, and those who were under-insured or had no insurance are to receive 80% of the funding towards reconstruction.

Amanatidis feels as if she is living in a disaster zone. Heating is not due on until March and she has to travel to her boyfriend’s home in Bonn,30km away, to have a shower. As for the federal elections this month, or her view on the political fallout from the biggest catastrophe Germany has faced since the end of the second world war, she shrugged: “I am in my own world right now. I can’t do anything except live in the moment and focus on the hope of being able to gather the family on this patio again. The election is so not on my radar.”

Even politicians seem to have little appetite. Mechthild Heil, the local MP for Ahrweiler and a member of the Christian Democrats, said outside her rubble-surrounded office: “No one is remotely interested in the election. People here need emergency aid.”

By the remains of a brick bridge at Insul, one of 60 bridges out of 62 on the Ahr to have collapsed, Martin Schmitt, the Green party’s candidate in Ahrweiler, showed how the river had switched from the valley’s left side to the right, leaving houses in ruins.

“There are mayors who have said, ‘We’ll show that river,’ and would like to redirect it to its pre-flood route,” he said. “They still want to proceed with riverside housing developments,

despite the clear evidence by experts that we need to completely rethink.”

Despite expectations they would gain from the scale of the disaster, the Greens are struggling with the fine line between showing empathy and appearing to exploit the catastrophe. “I can hardly go through town with a megaphone, putting up election posters,” said Schmitt. “The best I can do in this situation – the election could hardly be more remote to most people here – is to show my face, talk to people, put them in touch with each other and mediate between someone I know who has a dehumidifier and someone I meet who needs one.”

Thomas Pütz’s orthopaedics business was hit by the floods and he is now coordinating a volunteer effort of more than 100,000 helpers. He said there had been a deliberate effort to keep politics out of the relief effort after attempts by groups including the far right to infiltrate the ranks.

Armin Laschet, Angela Merkel’s preferred successor as chancellor, fanned the backlash when he was caught on camera laughing at a joke in a flood-stricken town while the president was delivering a speech.

In a shed in a Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler car park, Silke Wolf, a volunteer hairdresser with the Barber Angels association, said she had no trust in any party, least of all the Greens. “It does not feel like the Greens have grasped the big picture. It will take more than an electric car – which I can’t afford anyway – to sort out the mess we’re in,” she said. “Whether coronavirus or the floods, the universe has given us a kick up the backside and it’s about time those in power recognised that.”