Person of the week: Lambrecht: Minister of the 5000 helmets

Person of the week: Lambrecht
Minister of 5000 Helms

By Wolfram Weimer
02/01/2022 11:43 am

The new defense minister cuts an unhappy figure in the first few weeks. In the Ukraine crisis, it even caused a scandal. Nervousness is spreading in the Bundeswehr, as well as in the SPD.

The political and media echo is not only miserable, it is devastating. The decision by Federal Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht that Germany’s military support for the beleaguered Ukraine consisted in the delivery of 5,000 military protective helmets was perceived as “disgrace” (Focus), “traffic light dance” (Spiegel) and “laughing stock” (Berliner Morgenpost). The FAZ ironically recommends that the Minister of Defense “send the Gorch Fock to the Black Sea”. The “Bild” newspaper is outraged: “The whole world is laughing at us”. Lambrecht is now “the first contender for the golden post,” says the Stuttgarter Zeitung.

Ukraine has specifically asked the federal government for the helmets, but the symbolic value far exceeds the value of the facts. Even Reinhard Bütikofer, ex-Chairman of the Greens, finds the process “embarrassing at best.” Kiev’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko calls it an “absolute joke.” In the Ukraine debate, the new CDU leader Friedrich Merz attests that the federal government is fueling “doubts about Germany’s reliability”. the New York Times warns Germany falters in the Ukraine drama and worries its allies.

Three reasons for the disaster

The delivery of the helmet turned into a political mess for the Minister of Defense for three reasons. On the one hand – strategically – because in the process, Germany’s foreign policy uncertainty seems to have become grotesque. The new federal government is faltering due to the Ukraine crisis and is increasingly irritating Eastern Europeans and allies with contradictory signals. The criticism of the New York Times that Germany is putting itself on the sidelines is shared among European neighbors. Lambrecht’s 5000 helmets are now an international symbol of this.

Secondly – tactically – the Helm action shows that the government is clumsily solving a tricky foreign policy situation. The honorable search for a diplomatic peace policy requires particular surefootedness in diplomatic symbols. So far, the new Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, has been moving skillfully and confidently over the slippery surface of crisis diplomacy. But a chancellor who seems to have gone into hiding, an SPD ex-chancellor who is Putin’s pupil and a clumsy defense minister spoil the strategic line. Suddenly, Berlin no longer looks like a potential bridge builder, but rather like an insouciant dodger of world politics.

Third, the process puts the new defense minister herself in the limelight of criticism. The defense expert of the Union faction, Florian Hahn (CSU), is already sounding: “The defense minister is a failure in the current situation.” The opposition identified Lambrecht as a weak point in the new traffic light cabinet and launched an attack. Concern is also heard within the Bundeswehr that Lambrecht is now the third time in a row (after Ursula von der Leyen and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer) that a woman without any military-political experience has become Minister of Defense. In an acute military crisis in Europe, this is not good.

In fact, Lambrecht is a South Hessian lawyer and worked as a lawyer in Viernheim. In her political career, she focused on legal policy and made it to the post of Minister of Justice in 2019. During the coalition negotiations, she was under discussion as the new interior minister – that would have been widely accepted. In the personnel shifts of cabinet formation, however, the Ministry of Defense suddenly fell to her, which caused some astonishment.

Minister without mandate

Above all, Lambrecht has the handicap of no longer having his own Bundestag mandate. She had actually already announced her departure from Berlin politics and refrained from running for parliament again. This makes her the only cabinet member without a parliamentary mandate — a tricky situation in the key office of defense.

The troops shake their heads

Lambrecht therefore started with a skeptical eye (“Minister in basic training – for the troops this is at a bad time”, warned the “WORLD” and promptly caused clumsiness. While the handover of government was celebrated harmoniously and collegially in all other ministries, there was a crunch in the Ministry of Defense from the very first moment.

Hasty personnel decisions caused irritation. Lambrechts already had an expansive personnel policy in his previous position caused trouble, in the transition weeks she got again criticized in terms of personnel policy. Lambrecht caused the troops to shake their heads in the first few days. Instead of immediately broaching the precarious situation in Ukraine, she initially stunned with topics such as right-wing activities in the troops or the announcement that the Bundeswehr urgently needed more female generals. In one of her first, she spreads a conceivably clumsy formulation big interviews: “We must target Putin”.

In her first weeks as Secretary of Defense, she worked communication peculiar. Messages like “Hoopoe voted Bird of the Year 2022. He’s also at home with the Bundeswehr” or “gourmet cuisine high above the clouds” of all things to describe the Crisis mission around Libya still made for laughs. When the scandal surrounding Navy Chief Kay-Achim Schönbach passed, the troops laughed.

There is unrest among the generals because structures suddenly come into question and new appointments to top positions are feared. rumors about one Dismissal of Inspector General Eberhard Zorn made the rounds. “There is an uncomfortable level of uncertainty,” one hears from the general staff.

With the 5000 helmets, the uncomfortable uncertainty has also reached the Chancellery. Concern about the stumbling of defense policy has reached the top of the Chancellery’s agenda. A crisis meeting of 20 top SPD politicians discussed the Ukraine crisis on Monday and discussed the uncomfortable situation between the pro-Russian bluster of former chancellor and Kremlin lobbyist Gerhard Schröder and the demand for arms deliveries to Ukraine. Former party leader Sigmar Gabriel had called for the latter and explained: “We disagree in our assessment of the situation in Ukraine, are afraid for our economic interests and are glad that others are pulling the hot potatoes out of the fire for us.” Christine Lambrecht with her 5000 helmets sits right between these chairs.