Passau, the City of Concepts – FDP Group Warns Against Another Plan Gathering Dust in a Drawer
The FDP group on Passau city council welcomes the fact that, following the Liberals’ push for a youth council and a democratically elected youth policy spokesperson, the SPD, CSU and ÖDP, together with the Greens, …
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The FDP group on Passau city council welcomes the fact that, following the Liberals’ push for a youth council and a democratically elected youth policy spokesperson, the SPD, CSU and ÖDP, together with the Greens, PAL and FWG, are now also taking action on the matter. At the same time, it sharply criticises the path that has been chosen. Instead of binding implementation along Bavarian lines – Regensburg, Erlangen, Ingolstadt and Pfaffenhofen have been showing for years how it is done – a “Children and Youth Participation Project Group” is to develop a concept from the start of the 2026/27 school year until mid-2027. What happens after that remains open. “Unfortunately, we know this pattern all too well. Passau is the city of concepts, where a lot is planned, a lot is discussed and little is implemented,” says group chairman Prof. Dr. Holm Putzke. “We have a city centre development concept from 2009 whose only really visible result is the Domplatz, inaugurated in 2013. We have an integrated climate protection concept from 2021 with 45 flagship projects – hardly anyone could say off the top of their head which of them have actually been implemented five years later. Now youth participation is to go the same way. We say: not again.”
A whole series of Bavarian cities have long since gone down the route of a youth council – some of them astonishingly quickly. Prof. Georg Steiner, deputy group chairman, explains: “Ingolstadt took the decision in February 2021, and the first youth parliament was elected as early as June 2021 – nine months from decision to election.
And Passau is supposed to need a year just for another concept – without there necessarily being a youth council at the end of it?” Steiner stresses that the structure has been deliberately chosen so that “entirely different forms of participation” could emerge at the end. “That is the classic wording used to push an issue out of the design phase and into a review loop. We know this from the cultural sector, from neighbourhood development and from transport planning. The result: the folder ends up on the shelf.” Group chairman Holm Putzke recalls an almost identical initiative from May 2020 on the “participation of children and young people”, signed by Siegfried Kapfer, Katja Raitmaier, Evi Buhmann and Andreas Dittlmann. “Nothing whatsoever came of it back then. Only shortly before the election did the usual demands appear, and nobody noticed that the same people making the promises had already failed to keep them six years earlier. That is pure politics of deception. No wonder nobody trusts politicians any more.”
Sebastian Frankenberger, deputy group chairman and himself a member, in the mid-1990s, of the core group from which the Passau youth council emerged in 1997, adds: “It is remarkable that the three groups should be citing the very procedure that preceded the founding of the youth council in 1997. I was there at the time. For two years, under the leadership of the city youth worker, we searched for ways forward because we were starting from scratch – without experience, without comparable models and without examples in other cities. Wanting to start all over again thirty years later is not humility, it is a waste of time.” Frankenberger points to the 2026 election year, in which practically all the parties now represented on the city council spoke out in favour of better youth participation. “When everyone says during the election campaign that they want something – and then, three months after the election, jointly put a review mandate into the process instead of adopting a proven solution – that is hard to explain to citizens and, above all, to young people.” In the Liberals’ view, the accusation by SPD group chairman Markus Sturm that the FDP tried to claim the issue for itself single-handedly misses the mark: “A Lord Mayor Holm Putzke would long since have delivered on our election promises, including the establishment of a youth council. We haven’t grabbed anything for ourselves, we have put something on the table – a concrete motion with concrete resolution points. That is exactly the job of a group on a city council. If other groups then follow suit, that is to be welcomed. But if they follow suit to buy a year’s time, it is not,” says Frankenberger.
The FDP group is maintaining in full its motion to re-establish a youth council along the lines of Regensburg, Erlangen and Ingolstadt, as well as the subsequent amendment on a democratically elected youth policy spokesperson, and is tabling both at the meeting of the Committee for Children, Youth and Family on 7 July 2026. It calls on the other groups to make an honest decision at this meeting: for a proven structure with a clear timetable – or for yet another concept with an open outcome. The project group included in the three groups’ package of motions can usefully accompany parallel work on statutes under Article 23 of the Bavarian Municipal Code. But it must not replace it.
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