Dear fellow campaigners,

today I want to talk about two things that are closely connected for me: how much responsibility we trust our members with, and what kind of party we actually want to be.

On the motion about combining the Local Lead role, the state executive board and a municipal mandate:

I understand the intention. Volunteer work can be a lot. It can be too much. And of course we should look out for one another.

But to me, care does not mean pre-emptively making decisions for other people, or suggesting to them, through guidelines or bylaws, how much responsibility they should trust themselves with.

I count myself as an example here. I constantly have to remind myself to regulate my own workload, and not take on yet another task out of sheer enthusiasm, conviction and excitement. I know this learning process, and I am right in the middle of it.

And I don’t believe it’s ever really finished for true believers. Anyone who cares deeply about a cause tends to quickly think: I can take that on too. I can help with that too. That matters.

So the decisive question isn’t whether we can fully protect people from taking on too much. It’s whether we trust them to recognise their own limits, gain experience, and learn from it.

Our members are capable adults. Self-care isn’t something a set of guidelines can take on for us.

When we notice that someone is reaching their limits with several tasks, we should talk to each other, clarify expectations, and work out together what’s realistically manageable. But we shouldn’t pre-emptively discourage people from taking on responsibility in more than one place.

Above all, though, our reality is a different one: especially in rural regions, we don’t have an unlimited number of active members. And even fewer people who are not just willing to take on responsibility, but who actually have the time and capacity to do so.

That’s exactly why we should be glad when people can and want to take on responsibility in several areas, not hold them back with a well-meant “you’d better not.”

Which brings me to the second point.

Sometimes I read our regulations and wonder whether I’ve missed us sitting in several state parliaments and the Bundestag by now.

My perception is a different one.

We are a young party. We want to grow, become visible, win members and win mandates.

And at the same time, we sometimes build structures as if our main job were managing the success we’ve already achieved.

Yet pretty much everyone I know in this party wants to act pragmatically, progressively and pan-European. I don’t know anyone who joined Volt to get bogged down in responsibilities, guidelines and structures.

To me, pragmatic means aligning rules with reality.

Progressive means opening up possibilities instead of pre-emptively limiting them.

Pan-European means tolerating diversity and different paths.

Of course we need rules. But rules should help us do politics, not end up with us managing ourselves.

I’d even like us to become a bit more unwieldy at some point, not in the sense of slow or immobile, but because size inevitably makes things more complex.

When we hold a great many mandates, carry a great deal of responsibility, and have to coordinate a great many people, decisions and processes inevitably become more demanding.

But I want us to earn that unwieldiness first.

Through growth. Through mandates. Through responsibility.

Not by taking it on in advance, today, before we need to.

So I’d like us to ask ourselves more often going forward:

Does this rule actually solve a real problem, or are we already building the administration for a party we haven’t become yet?

(This is the speech draft, trimmed of two points that turned out to be unnecessary; in the speech itself, individual passages may have been phrased slightly differently.)