Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Person of the week
Annalena Baerbock has a problem
By Wolfram Weimer
The Greens celebrate Annalena Baerbock as the new candidate for Chancellor. But with the reaching for the highest office, the public will perceive it differently from now on, and it will be checked for suitability for chancellor – and that is where weak points open up.
“Yes, I have never been Chancellor, never a Minister either. I stand for renewal,” Annalena Baerbock announced her candidacy for Chancellor. She addressed her campaign problem head on and tried cleverly to rephrase it for an advantage – her lack of experience.
Baerbock wants to become Federal Chancellor, take on the Putins, Bidens and Erdogans of the world, but has never ruled anything – no federal state, no ministry, no district office, not even a village town hall, even if it is in her home town of Patenssen near Hanover. She lacks any government experience, but she is reaching for the most powerful government office in the state.
The SPD chairman, Norbert Walter-Borjans, immediately reminds us that you can lead Germany “only with solid experience in government” and that Olaf Scholz is the better candidate for chancellor. The SPD party newspaper “Vorwärts” comments: “It has no government experience, neither at the federal nor at the state level. Within the Greens, this is not unproblematic for a federal election campaign in the middle of the corona pandemic and a massive economic crisis.” The topic is also taken up from the CSU. The President of the Bavarian State Parliament, Ilse Aigner, says: “I’m curious to see how far you can keep the show going.” The lack of government experience could soon become a flaw for Baerbock. The international press reported in astonishment about the new candidate’s “no government experience”.
In fact, all previous Chancellors had been able and should gain government experience in different positions. In Germany – a country where every chimney sweep has to prove his master craftsman’s certificate before he can go high – Goethe’s dictum “Experience is the best divining rod” applies a lot. If the Greens – as in previous decades – were to fight for third or fourth place in the German political party landscape, then the issue would be secondary. Now, however, they have a real chance of appointing the next Chancellor, and that makes the candidate’s blankness in terms of government competence a problem – it looks like trying to drive a car without a driver’s license. The leaders of the party are hastily trying to put the weakness of their new candidate for chancellor into perspective. Winfried Kretschmann reminds us that he had no experience of government either. Robert Habeck emphasized already at the moment of the election that he would help and “bring” his experience to governments and coalition negotiations.
Green officials react sensitively to the subject of government experience and officially prefer to emphasize the strengths of their candidate – sympathy, specialist knowledge, assertiveness, and she is the only woman in the field of candidates, even mother and embodies a new generation. But the optimistic mood among the Greens is not free from doubts. The party’s election campaign professionals remember the election campaigns of 2013 and 2017. In both cases, the Greens started with brilliant polls, then scared away the middle class with wrong topics and a banned party attitude and ended up with a meager 8.4 percent (2013) and 8.9 percent (2017) stranded. Once it was tax increases and criticism of cars, the other time it was the demand for a “Veggie Day”, during which the party pleaded for meat-free days in German canteens.
This time, too, there is the risk that unpopular, ideological demands will come from the left wing of the party, such as the stigmatization of homes for alleged climate reasons. Baerbock will lead an election campaign against the image of the prohibition party and at the same time have to drive away the specter of a green-red-red government perspective. Many of the new Green voters come from the middle class and would be frightened off again by the prospect of such a left-wing government with the SED successor party. Baerbock could solve this problem by ruling out such a coalition and preventing new demands for a ban. But will she do that? Is it possible that you lack government experience?
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