The churned-up garden of the clubhouse for pensioners is preoccupying Peter Klotsche. “It’s the raccoons,” he says. “They come at night and toss up the earth looking for worms and we really don’t know how best to stop it.”

The clubhouse, Stille Strasse, in northern Berlin, is abuzz with members wanting to put questions to local politicians before Sunday’s elections. The raccoons are a central talking point, as well as affordable housing and, not least, the future of the club itself, which remains at the centre of a struggle over attempts to turn it into luxury homes. A decade ago, its members squatted in it for more than 100 days to save it from developers.

“We certainly know how to stick up for ourselves,” says Klotsche, 80, who helps run the club. The retirees earned the respect of politicians and locals and are well aware of their might on a local level.

Nationally, older Germans are a force to be reckoned with. Over-65s make up more than a fifth of the electorate, and the figure is projected to be more than one in three by 2060. Over-60s are the most likely to vote, with an 80% participation rate.

It is an age group that no party wants to get on the wrong side of, which is perhaps why one of the nation’s most pressing issues, the future of the German pension, has been one of the least fleshed out during the campaign so far. Polling by the Bertelsmann Foundation places it as the third most important issue for voters, after the environment and immigration and ahead of eduction, housing and the coronavirus pandemic.

Klotsche, worked as a locksmith and welder for 55 years before retiring in 2001; his wife, Brigitte, ran a kindergarten. “We have not had it easy,” he says. He recalls the struggles of his generation to stay in work after the collapse of the communist East Germany, where they lived, and the fight for their pensions to fall more in line with those paid to workers from the former West Germany.

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