Flipping the Script

In this reversal of the town-hall political debate, voters take center stage, and candidates ask the questions.

The German news outlet Deutche Welle was looking for a new approach to candidate debates ahead of the 2021 national election.

The team created a new debate format in which voters discuss the issues, while candidates sit in the audience, listen and ask questions.

The project was an experiment, said Aya Ibrahim, media trainer and TV/social media reporter at DW News, said at the 2022 Listen Louder conference.

“Politicians get a lot of airtime,” she said. “We noticed that these debates often turn into political posturing — too much on party and personality and not so much on policy. And, often, voters were very removed from these debates.”

The team’s concept shifted that balance through the debate’s format and physical stage layout. A pair of voters representing different viewpoints on an issue became the focus of the debate, engaging directly with each other instead of with a moderator. The candidates running for office were arranged as the audience.

Without the drama of political posturing, the team needed to make sure the debate was still interesting to watch. They doubled down on “basic journalism,” as Ibrahim put it, such as focusing on specific issues of local importance. The debates ran as a four-part series, covering climate change, migration, cannabis legalization and social mobility.

The program invited candidates from all political parties with a parliamentary group in the German Bundestag. The candidates had a chance to give individual responses as part the conclusion of the show.

The debates performed well as news content, Ibrahim said.

“The numbers were above average, but what I took away was the quality of the comments we had on social media,” she said.

“You had people who wouldn’t meet on a day-to-day setting to talk about climate solutions in Germany, but here they are sitting together eye-to-eye in the same room. The discussion had an empathetic quality, and that was reflected in the comments.”

See the episode on climate change (YouTube, 30 min.) and a behind-the-scenes look at how the team produced it (Facebook, 4:09).