Manfred Güllner

Manfred Güllner (born December 31, 1941 in Remscheid ) is a German sociologist , social psychologist and business economist . He is the founder and managing director of the Forsa Institute and at the same time a well-known SPD member .

Life

Manfred Güllner, son of a pliers maker, graduated from high school in 1961 at the Christian-Rauch-Gymnasium in Arolsen . He later worked for three years as a research assistant at the sociological seminar at the University of Cologne . From 1970 to 1978 he was a member of the management team at the Institute for Applied Social Science (infas). From there, Güllner moved to the Statistical Office of the City of Cologne, which he led as director. In 1984 he finally founded the Forsa-Gesellschaft, which he established alongside Emnid , Allensbach and infratest dimap as a leading German opinion research institute.

On December 3, 2003, the Academic Senate of the Free University of Berlin appointed him honorary professor for journalism and communication studies . Güllner has been a regular guest lecturer at the European Media and Business Academy since 2008 .

Manfred Güllner lives with his family in Berlin .

Controversy

For an opinion researcher, Güllner is considered to be extremely “opinionated”. He showed little reluctance to interpret the results of the Forsa surveys. This brought him repeatedly the accusation that he was mixing the data obtained with personal views, resulting in a cocktail that looks serious and independent, but is full of opinion.

The surveys conducted by his institute for Stern magazine and RTL television station regularly yielded particularly high or low values ​​for the parties. The soaring heights or rapid crashes are therefore exciting headline suppliers, from which the accusation was derived that he brought himself into the media through particularly extreme results and thus did marketing for his institute. The drastic results could also become self-fulfilling prophecies in which parties could appear particularly attractive or unattractive.

Güllner has been a member of the SPD since 1964 . The Forsa Society is therefore assumed to be close to the SPD. It successfully obtained an injunction against corresponding allegations from the CDU . Forsa no longer receives any orders from the SPD. Güllner again claimed in an interview in 2008 that the opinion research institute Infratest dimap had been “the SPD's house institute for forty years. And then you will think about whether you should not beautify the numbers a little or not ”. Infratest dimap sued Güllner for injunctive relief before the Berlin regional court and was proved right.

He has been friends with Gerhard Schröder for decades. The SPD, on the other hand, has a problematic relationship with Güllner. He wages a guerrilla war against the party with biting comments in the media. Güllner said, among other things, that Rudolf Scharping was "already overwhelmed as Prime Minister", Björn Engholm was "a gifted for no good", Kurt Beck could neither correctly assess nor cope with reality outside his ideal world. He also said of the then-designated candidate for chancellor: “Beck has to go in any case. If he were a little tall, he would see that and draw the consequences ”. About Ralf Stegner , Güllner said, “With all due respect, people perceive him as a puke”. He is said to have called Franz Müntefering a " Stalinist apparatchik ". On the SPD chancellor candidate in the 2013 federal election , Peer Steinbrück , Güllner missed the format and initiative. Güllner repeatedly linked his analyzes with the request to exchange party leaders or top candidates. Almost two weeks before the state elections in Lower Saxony in 2013, he also publicly recommended to the federal chairman of the FDP , Philipp Rösler , to step down before the election.

In the book “Die Grünen: Höhenflug oder Crash?” Published before the 2013 federal election, Güllner conjured a threat to democracy through the successes of Alliance 90 / The Greens , warned of a “green dictatorship ” and drew parallels to the rise of the NSDAP and the End of the Weimar Republic . In addition, the Greens are responsible for the falling voter turnout in Germany. The book received mostly negative reviews. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Wolfgang Jäger judged : “Güllner's thesis does not find any support in the research on non-voters that he only mentioned in passing, as the author uses the literature on party and democracy research only very sparingly. The book thrives on the polemical escalation. It wants to provoke. [...] The exaggeration is at the expense of the seriousness of the book. ”Karsten Polke-Majewski judged Güllner's theses as“ bizarre ” at the time . At the same time, Frank Drieschner called the book a diatribe that was sloppy, ignorant and absurd in its judgment. Evidence for Güllner's "riot journalism" based on the model of Thilo Sarrazin is sought in vain; it even contradicts the results that Forsa himself had determined. Bernhard Walker called the analytical part of the book “simply nonsense”. You don't have to take the book seriously, the "allegations are so grotesque that one wonders how a much-quoted pollster can seriously utter them." Manfred Esslinger came to the conclusion in the Süddeutsche Zeitung : “It's hard to imagine that someone who is a statistician by profession would dare to enter the market with such an 'analysis'. [...] It's so simple that it's not even confused. A clear case of suicide. "

Fonts

• The Greens: Soaring or Crashing? , Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 2012, ISBN 3451306743
• On the way to the 'black republic'? Voter mobilization of the SPD and CDU / CSU in the last decades , in: The Federal Parliament election 2002. An investigation under the sign of high political dynamism. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2005, pp. 211-224, ISBN 3-531-14004-3

Web links

• Literature by and about Manfred Güllner in the catalog of the German National Library

supporting documents

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Veit Medick , opinion researcher Güllner: Der Steinbrück-Schreck , Der Spiegel, April 19, 2013
2. ^ ^{A b} Forsa boss Güllner: surveys are never exact , Hessische / Niedersächsische Allgemeine. Retrieved March 16, 2017
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Sebastian Beck, Opinions and Nasties , Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Stefan Niggemeier , Betrayed , Der Spiegel, February 18, 2013
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Roland Nelles : Numbers from the witch's kitchen , Der Spiegel, August 6, 2007
6. ↑ Stefan Reinecke : The "image" among the institutes , taz, September 5, 2013.
7. ^ "Beck must go" , interview in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010
8. ↑ Manfred Güllner: The Greens. Soaring or falling? , Freiburg im Breisgau 2012, p. 135 ff.
9. ↑ Manfred Güllner: The Greens. Soaring or falling? , Freiburg im Breisgau 2012, p. 159 ff.
10. ↑ Wolfgang Jäger , Green, greener, greenest… . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 28, 2013
11. ↑ Karsten Polke-Majewski, pollsters spread bizarre theses , Die Zeit, September 24, 2012
12. ↑ ^{a b} Frank Drieschner, Hated all night again , Die Zeit, October 6, 2012
13. ↑ ^{a b} Bernhard Walker, A Danger for the Republic? , Badische Zeitung, October 23, 2012
14. ↑ Manfred Esslinger, review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 23, 2012