adds statement German head of state, social democrat leader
BERLIN (awp/afp) – Close to Putin and major Russian groups, always quick to attack Ukraine, ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has become a cumbersome figure in Germany, including for Olaf Scholz, whose he was the mentor.
At 77, the one who succeeded in 1998 in overthrowing Helmut Kohl, the irremovable Chancellor of Reunification, is the subject of growing criticism in Germany.
“This Gerhard Schröder wanders in the china shop of foreign policy, somewhere in the unsavory gray zone between embarrassment and farce”, summarizes in a vitriolic editorial the public channel ARD.
In question? His ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, of which he has become one of the most ardent defenders, including when Moscow is massing more than 100,000 soldiers on the border with Ukraine.
Friendship and financial ties
Mr. Schröder, chancellor when Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, established “a real friendship, based on trust” with the Russian leader, whom he portrayed in 2004 as a “perfect democrat”, explains to the AFP political scientist Ursula Münch.
One of the keys to this “manly friendship”, in the words of the German press, is to be found in the past of the two men.
“Perhaps the fact that our two families suffered a lot from the Second World War brings us closer,” said Mr. Schröder in 2016. “I lost my father”, a Wehrmacht soldier, killed in 1944 in Romania, and “a brother of Putin died during the siege of Leningrad”, he noted.
Financial ties also connect the former lawyer to Russia.
Mr. Schröder should thus join the supervisory board of the Russian giant Gazprom in June. A new cap in the Russian energy sector for the one who is already chairman of the board of directors of Rosneft, the first Russian oil group, and of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream 2, a controversial Russian-German gas pipeline also built by Gazprom.
“The former chancellor is important for Putin. He heads the boards of oil and gas groups and is at the center of a network of Russian influence in Germany,” summarizes the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The one who won the esteem of the Germans by opposing the Western intervention in Iraq in 2003, but who now receives hundreds of thousands of euros each year from Russian companies, appears today above all as a lobbyist.
His recent statements urging Kiev to put an end to “the noise of boots” at its border seem to have served as a trigger in Germany, including in its former party, itself suspected of complacency with regard to Moscow.
The statements of the former chancellor feed “the polyphony within the SPD which gives a problematic impression of indecision”, notes Ursula Münch.
Several tenors of the SPD are now cutting bridges one after the other with the cumbersome Mr. Schröder.
“Being an employee of Putin as a former chancellor, I think it’s serious,” got carried away a former party official, Rudolf Dressler, in the Spiegel.
Scholz and Steinmeier distance themselves
Olaf Scholz himself, yet close among those close to Mr. Schröder when the latter was chancellor, and an ardent defender of his most contested social reforms, has distanced himself.
Gerhard Schröder “does not speak on behalf of the government, he does not work for the government”, launched on February 7 as an update on CNN Olaf Scholz during a trip to Washington intended to reassure the American ally on German reliability.
He was followed on Sunday by the German head of state, Frank-Walter Stenmeier, who was once Mr. Schröder’s closest collaborator in the chancellery.
“I bear the responsibility for my words, Gerhard Schröer for his,” he said on public television.
How much longer, under these conditions, will Gerhard Schröder be able to continue to use the staff and premises made available to him as former Chancellor of the Chamber of Deputies?
These costs are estimated by the popular daily Bild at nearly 300,000 euros per year. The conservative opposition demands that the state stop paying.
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