Club member experiences elections the German way

When Lisa Hagen arrived in Germany to cover the final months of the election campaign, she discovered that Chancellor Angela Merkel was on vacation.

Just over a month before Germans went to the polls this year, Merkel, seeking her fourth term in office, was not on the campaign trail and instead was out of the country.

And for Hagen, reporting in Germany on an Arthur Burns Fellowship from the International Center for Journalists, it was one of many differences from the American way.

“Any time anyone is away from the campaign trail in the U.S., it ends up being a big controversy,” she said. “But there, German voters understood that everyone needs a break.”

For her fellowship, available to young journalists from Canada, the United States and Germany to report from each other’s countries, Hagen spent some time working for Handelsblatt, a German-language business newspaper.

Normally a campaign reporter for The Hill, Hagen was based in Berlin. One of the major differences she noticed was the plethora of campaign posters all over the streets, which are less important than television advertisements in the U.S.

“It was interesting to me how different the campaign is,” she said. “While we are so focused on TV and digital ads, for them, it’s these campaign posters.”

But in some ways, Hagen noted that things were very similar between the two countries, including the numerous campaign rallies. Candidates also battled in a televised debate, a phenomenon her German colleagues said is thanks to the American influence.

And election night, which she spent with the Green Party, was similar to the U.S. as activists and volunteers followed results on big screens. Although with the need to form a coalition government in Germany, election night was just the start of the political deal-making, with talks still underway.

What Hagen said she had not expected, however, was the rest of the world’s interest in American politics. She recalled seeing President Donald Trump – and sometimes screenshots of his tweets -- on the front page of German newspapers, and realizing that Americans could be more engaged with international politics.

“That made me realize how much everyone else knows about us and how we don’t know about other people,” she said. “As a personal experience, it made me realize we as Americans should tune more into the rest of the world and what’s happening and how it affects us.”

Now that she is back in D.C. and back at The Hill, Hagen said she will look to use the lessons she learned in Germany to cover U.S. elections, especially the need to understand people’s differences.

“It was 10 times harder to do than the job I do every day because I had to get through language barriers and a litany of other things like that,” she said. “It made me think about things a little differently and how to cover politics differently, and it made me a little more mindful of that when I’m back here reporting in Washington.”