SHARE
COPY LINK

ENVIRONMENT

Grannies for Future: 100-year-old German great-grandma enters politics

Meet the 100-year-old German great-grandmother who is shaking up politics and standing up to climate change.

Grannies for Future: 100-year-old German great-grandma enters politics
Heise in Kirschheimbolanden in March. Photo: DPA

German great-grandmother Lisel Heise's ambition to enter politics crystalized a few years before her 100th birthday, when organizers of a public hearing cut off her microphone.

Heise, who retired from teaching school 40 years ago, was arguing for the reopening of an outdoor pool.

“When I started out, some people really didn't want to listen to me apparently — they even pulled the plug!” she said, still stunned by the impudence.

“Now people from around the world are coming to talk to me. Who's laughing now?”

What changed was Heise's election, against the odds, to the town council of Kirchheimbolanden in southwestern Germany just weeks after she embarked on her second century on the planet.

It was no accident that the pool galvanized Heise, given two issues close to her heart: young people and public health.

Those concerns have also dovetailed in another pet cause: climate protection.

The remarkably spry Heise says she has taken inspiration from the Fridays for Future youth protest movement.

“The kids really give me hope. There is a tendency in politics to favour the car industry and that's counterproductive,” she said.

“It's great that the youth aren't just waiting for the grownups to do something.”

'Bundles of energy'

Heise, who takes daily walks through the quaint old town of Kirchheimbolanden, population 8,000, is part of a groundswell of seniors unwilling to sit out their dotage on the sidelines of public life.

The Omas Gegen Rechts (Grannies Against the Right) action group fighting extremism launched in Austria in 2017 and has since expanded to Germany. It
regularly rallies elderly women, drawing on the lessons of history to stand up
to racism.

'Omas gegen Rechts' protesting in Berlin on July 25th, 2019. Photo: DPA

Heise's political career began in earnest earlier this year when a town council member, Thomas Bock, 59, saw her as a potential ally.

Bock runs the political group Wir für Kibo (WfK, roughly We for Kibo, the town's nickname), which is agitating against the established parties for more transparency and accountability.

He needed a candidate who would have the gravitas and passion to fight the powers that be.

“She's got a strong character and bundles of energy,” he said.

Bock said the fact that most middle-aged Kirchheimbolanden natives had had Heise as a teacher when they were young was also a distinct advantage.

“Everyone respects her,” Bock said.

'Chance to right some wrongs' 

The town has been governed for more than two decades by Angela Merkel's conservative CDU, most recently in a “grand coalition” with the Social Democrats just like the one Merkel leads in Berlin.

But WfK's success has helped shift the majority, and now a new alliance of left-leaning parties is ready to take over the 24-member council.

Heise said her election was pure luck. “But now that I have the chance to right some wrongs, I'm going to seize it,” she added.

Not only is Heise a political rising star but also, of course, a witness to much of Germany's tumultuous 20th century.

Born in the aftermath of World War I, Heise said her father Fritz Waltgenbach, who owned a shoe factory, was also a town council member.

After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, he spoke out before his peers against the torching of the local synagogue and the persecution of Jews in their midst.

“The Nazis always talked about freedom but (in fact) you had to do what the party said and it led to awful things,” Heise said.

Waltgenbach spent several weeks in prison until a friend intervened with well-placed connections in Berlin, preventing him from being packed off to a concentration camp.

Heise said she likes to think she inherited some of his civic courage.

“The apple doesn't fall far from the tree,” she smiled.

'Ashamed' of Trump link

Heise lives a short walk from the site of the former synagogue, where a mature tree and a memorial now stand, in the sprawling house she once shared with her parents.

Widowed four years ago after more than seven decades of marriage, she now lives there with one of her four children and an adult grandson. She has eight great-grandchildren.

Heise regularly entertains visitors in her sitting room, which is filled with books including a prominently displayed volume of photos of Barack Obama.

“A politician needs to have a vision and think logically but also humanistically,” she said.

US President Donald Trump, whose ancestors came from the nearby village of Kallstadt, is “turning the world upside down”, she said.

“I'm ashamed his grandfather is from here.”

Heise stays physically and mentally fit working in her flower garden and watching political talk shows.

Cafe owner Sepandar Lashkari, 44, said Heise had been one of his first customers when he opened for business a few years ago and they've been close
friends ever since.

Lashkari, who moved to Germany from Iran as a teenager, called Heise “great publicity for the town”. He said she had also drained some of the cynicism that tends to pervade politics.

“A lot of people have become more politically active because of her,” he said. “She inspires young and old in a really positive way.”

By Deborah Cole

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
Paywall free

DRIVING

‘Città 30’: Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna has faced heavy criticism - including from the Italian government - after introducing a speed limit of 30km/h, but it's not the only city to approve these rules.

'Città 30': Which Italian cities will bring in new speed limits?

Bologna on January 17th became Italy’s first major city to introduce a speed limit of 30km/h on 70 percent of roads in the city centre under its ‘Città 30’ plan, first announced in 2022, and initially set to come into force by June 2023.

The move made Bologna one of a growing number of European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Brussels, and Bilbao, to bring in a 30km/h limit aimed at improving air quality and road safety.

But the change was met last week with a go-slow protest by Bologna’s taxi drivers and, perhaps more surprisingly, criticism from the Italian transport ministry, which financed the measure.

Matteo Salvini, who is currently serving as Italy’s transport minister, this week pledged to bring in new nationwide rules dictating speed limits in cities that would reverse Bologna’s new rule.

Salvini’s League party has long criticised Bologna’s ‘Città 30’ plan, claiming it would make life harder for residents as well as people working in the city and would create “more traffic and fines”.

OPINION: Italians and their cars are inseparable – will this ever change?

Bologna’s speed limit has sparked a heated debate across Italy, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of such measures in many other cities in Europe and worldwide in recent years.

While Bologna is the biggest Italian city to bring in the measure, it’s not the first – and many more local authorities, including in Rome, are now looking to follow their example in the next few years.

Some 60 smaller cities and towns in Italy have adopted the measure so far, according to Sky TG24, though there is no complete list.

This compares to around 200 French towns and cities to adopt the rule, while in Spain the same limit has applied to 70 percent of all the country’s roads since since May 2021 under nationwide rules, reports LA7.

The first Italian town to experiment with a 30 km/h speed limit was Cesena, south of Bologna, which introduced it in 1998. Since then, the local authority has found that serious accidents have halved, while the number of non-serious ones has remained unchanged.

Olbia, in Sardinia, also famously introduced the speed limit in 2021.

The city of Parma is planning to bring in the same rules from 2024, while the Tuscan capital of Florence approved five 30km/h zones in the city centre earlier this month.

Turin is set to bring in its first 30km/h limits this year as part of its broader plan to improve transport infrastructure, aimed at reducing smog and increasing livability.

READ ALSO: Why electric cars aren’t more popular in Italy

Meanwhile, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, has promised to introduce the limit on 70 percent of the capital’s roads by the end of his mandate, which expires in 2026.

In Milan, while the city council has voted in favour of lower speed limits and other traffic limitations on central roads, it’s not clear when these could come into force.

Milan mayor Beppe Sala this week said a 30 km/h limit would be “impossible” to implement in the Lombardy capital.

And it’s notable that almost all of the cities looking at slowing down traffic are in the north or centre-north of Italy.

There has been little interest reported in the measures further south, where statistics have shown there are a higher number of serious road accidents – though the total number of accidents is in fact higher in the north.

According to the World Health Organisation the risk of death to a pedestrian hit by a car driven at 50 km/h is 80 percent. The risk drops to 10 percent at 30 km/h.

The speed limit on roads in Italian towns and cities is generally 50, and on the autostrade (motorways) it’s up to 130.

Many Italian residents are heavily dependent on cars as their primary mode of transport: Italy has the second-highest rate of car ownership in Europe, with 670 vehicles per 1,000 residents, second only to Luxembourg with 682, according to statistics agency Eurostat.

SHOW COMMENTS