Darmstadt's head of town hall: Stop when it's most beautiful

Jochen Partsch can win elections, as Darmstadt's mayor from the Greens has shown quite impressively several times.

And he would have been the clear favorite in the next mayoral election.

This also has to do with the weakness of the other parties in Darmstadt.

After all, the CDU recently refrained from nominating its own candidate at all.

Treasurer André Schellenberg is considered highly competent and also an affable person.

But the ramp is not his place.

The SPD in Darmstadt, on the other hand, has proven over many years that it can successfully produce candidates for the office of mayor - until Partsch came along.

A lot of very tangible successes

The fact that the man has mastered the public appearance and also knows how to get angry in a well-dosed manner during robust discussions is a matter of the communicative talent that is indispensable in this position.

But Partsch also has a number of very tangible successes that he has worked on over the past eleven years - albeit together with others.

He rightly cites the World Heritage Site for the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt as one of the great successes. The expansion of public transport, such as the Lichtwiesenbahn to the TU campus, is another success, and the digitization of the city is another.

Even on his 60th birthday, which he recently celebrated, there was no sign of official fatigue.

On the other hand, it is humanly understandable that one does not only give up a job that one does with great joy and passion - and that is the case with Partsch - when the effort outweighs the joy and party friends with ever more carelessly cloaked impatience waiting for the decision to leave office.

In the case of Partsch and the Darmstadt Greens, according to everything that is known, this was not or not yet the case.

However, the short message from the board of directors about Partsch's decision does not sound as if the party had fallen on its knees to plead for Partsch's further candidacy.

On the contrary, the Darmstadt Green Party chairwoman Hildegard Förster-Hildmann emphasized with demonstrative calm that there are several women and men in the ranks of the Green Party who have what it takes to successfully apply for the Partsch successor.

The sadness about not being able to rely on the power of the draft horse Jochen Partsch in the future is apparently kept within reasonable limits.

Such is the business of politics.