Armin Laschet: Putin’s Manchurian candidate or Germany’s next great hope?
One of the first things to be noted about Armin Laschet, newly elected leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the party’s candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, is that he is only just a German. He is from Aachen – Aix-la-Chapelle – and his entire family, as well as his wife’s, is of direct Belgian ancestry.
Laschet speaks fluent French as well as German, not because he was a good student, but because it was rooted in his upbringing. His heimat, or homeland, is the region embracing the cities of Aachen, Liège and Maastricht, that for centuries was the Burgundian Duchy of Limburg. The people hereabouts speak dialects of German, French and Dutch and trace their heritage back to no less a figure than Charlemagne, emperor of the Franks.
Laschet grew up in the epicentre of what would become the European Union. Luxembourg is little more than an hour to the south, as is the border with France. Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam are each closer to his home in suburban Aachen than Berlin or Munich. Unlike his notoriously shifty politics, as hard to read as a canvas by the abstract illusionist Gerhard Richter, Laschet’s Nordrheinischer accent gives him away as soon as he opens his mouth.
But it is his politics, not his origins, that will determine whether or not he succeeds Merkel, who has confirmed that she will step down as Chancellor after the federal elections in September, bringing to an end nearly 16 years of almost unalloyed power.
Merkel probably expected that her successor would be Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, another borderer, this time from the tiny state of Saarland, of which she was minister-president for seven years. But AKK, as she is almost known, proved unpopular with the wider federal electorate and served little more than two years as CDU leader. Laschet took over on 16 January at the close of a hard-fought contest in which he narrowly defeated the bookies’ favourite, the lawyer and businessman (and fellow Rhinelander) Friedrich Merz.
Another candidate, thought to be papabile out of the right-field, is Marcus Söder, leader of the Bavarian-based Christian Social Union (CSU), sister party to the CDU. No CSU pretender has yet made it to the Chancellery, but Söder, a larger-than-life lawyer whose handling of the Covid crisis in Bavaria has attracted widespread praise, reportedly feels that it is time this particular political omission was put right. One thing is certain, if Söder does stand, Laschet will have to be at his best to secure the crown.
Laschet’s big strength is that he comes from a uniquely powerful state. Nordrhein-Westfalen, centred on the Ruhr, is still Germany’s industrial heartland, home to the cities of Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund and Essen. As the state’s minister-president since 2017, he has a voice that carries all the way to Berlin. His weakness is that he is everyone’s second choice. Even within the CDU, he is regarded by many as only the best of the worst. Across the country, he is perceived as both a maverick and – in spite of the obvious contradiction – something of a bore.
Should the CDU emerge from the federal elections as still the largest party in the Bundestag, Laschet will hope to move into the Chancellery. But this is far from guaranteed. Merkel has had her problems in recent years, not least with immigration, Covid, Brexit and the economy. But she remains a giant, in whom a majority of voters are prepared to place their trust. The leader who replaces her will not benefit from her fame and achievement. If anything, they are bound to look small by comparison.
There is, in any case, the possibility that after years in the doldrums the Social Democrats (SPD) might yet make a comeback and seize the top job, most obviously in coalition with the Greens, or that votes for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and resurgent Free Democrats (FDP) will so muddy the waters that anything can happen.
But if Laschet does steer the party to some sort of utilitarian triumph in September, what sort of a Chancellor can Germany – and the world – expect?
The Rhinelander’s portfolio of opinions is mercurial to say the least. He has spoken out in favour of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, whom he sees as the representative of stability and continuity in troubled times, and hinted – for reasons that seem to defy analysis – that the Trump administration in Washington secretly backed ISIS, the Islamist group that has vowed to destroy Israel and hopes to create a caliphate across the Middle East. He believes that Merkel was wrong to turn against Vladimir Putin and that the best way to deal with Russia is through Real Politik, not sanctions. He supports the completion of Nordstream 2, the controversial gas pipeline being built by Russia’s state-owned Gazprom that the US fears will increase Europe’s economic dependency on Moscow. It is even said that he does not accept as proven the case against Putin in the attempt on the lives of the former Spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in which the poison used was the Russian nerve agent Novichok.
According to the former Financial Times commentator Wolfgang Munchau, writing in the Oxford-based eurointelligence.com, Laschet may also be a closet climate denier.
“Europe,” he writes, “needs a CDU leader who is not beholden to a 20th century industrial model. Armin Laschet … is not that man.” Instead, he is “a coal guy,” who only a year ago commissioned a coal-fired power station and was instrumental in the decision to extend Germany’s exit from coal mining until 2038. Laschet, we are told, “embodies corporatism, industrial nationalism, mercantilism. He is a blast from the past.”
Not only that, but, if we are to believe one of Munchau’s recent tweets, “he is in the pocket of the Kremlin.”
So, does everyone in the Federal Republic share this dismal view of Laschet as past his sell-by date and even – heaven help us! – Putin’s Manchurian candidate? Not quite. There is always room in a functioning democracy for different points of view to co-exist without necessarily inviting chaos. Outside of Northern Ireland and America’s Old South, political leaders don’t normally win the future by backing history.
The contrary view is that Germany – still working its way through a painful transition from an analogue to a digital economy – has a duty to hold on to the skills that produced and sustained the Wirtschaftswunder. Precision engineering, from this perspective, will always be in high demand. Seen from the Ruhr, there is no need for Germany to worship exclusively at the twin altars of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. The need to make things, and to make them better than anybody else, is still there and is not about to become redundant, still less extinct. The trick, in the view of traditionalists, is to link the new technology to the old, so that what emerges embodies the best of both worlds – and today, looking at which nation is consistently number one in Europe, who is to say they are wrong?
If anything, should Laschet fall at the final hurdle, it is as likely to be because of his poor record on combatting Covid – a category, however, in which he is far from alone, even in Germany.
In EU terms, the Aachener is probably not always on the same page as his chère compatriote Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission. He naturally looks towards Brussels; she grew up there. That said, he could be expected to give his assent to 90 per cent of the current Commission programme. He went along with the Von der Leyen approach to Brexit, which he regretted but was prepared to accommodate on the most realistic terms available. A firm backer of Merkel’s 2015 admission of one million Muslim refugees, he wishes to see a positive, Europe-wide response to the migrant crisis. On the single currency, he is seen as “sound, as he is on Schengen. He is an implicit believer in the mutuality of the European Project. He opposed the expulsion of Greece from the Eurozone during the 2008-2012 debt crisis and, as part of the drive towards economic as well as monetary union, he has hinted at his support for Eurobonds, something of which the German Establishment, led by the Constitutional Court, remains highly sceptical.
One problem that could arise for him concerns debt. On the home front, but with important implications for the EU, he takes an old-school view on state-incurred debt and regards the requirement that it should not exceed agreed limits as fundamentally sound. The Covid crisis, which has prompted an extraordinary surge in borrowing, is already testing the assumptions behind the so-called ‘debt brake’, and it will be interesting to see to what extent Laschet holds his ground should he end up as Chancellor.
Two last things should be said about the latest heir-presumptive to Germany’s seat at the European Council. The first is that he is certain to find President Joe Biden a vastly more sympathetic ally than the now-departed Donald Trump. Even if they are not destined to see eye to eye on Assad and Putin, the two men are practising Catholics, guided by their faith. The second thing is that Laschet, a firm believer in the role of the Franco-German motor at the heart of Europe, is a friend and ally of France’s Emmanuel Macron. Last year, still in his role as the political head of Nordrhein-Westfalen (in which capacity he opened his state’s Covid wards to seriously ill French citizens), he was a special guest at the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris and was even invited by the President to accompany him on a tour of the Élysée Palace gardens. You don’t get more Franco-German than that.