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The Un-Candidate

Why Won't German Foreign Minister Admit He's Campaigning?

By Dirk Kurbjuweit

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier claims he's not campaigning for September's election yet. But he's been stumping against Chancellor Angela Merkel for weeks now -- even if he isn't using her name in his political salvos against her office and party.

Is this an election campaign? "No," says Germany's foreign minister, he isn't campaigning -- not right now. These days, he's showing responsibility -- democracy is in danger, but the normal people don't seem to be showing much interest. On top of that, we're in the midst of a global economic downturn. He certainly wouldn't start his campaign so early, in February, under these conditions. He expresses mild outrage at the very thought.

That's how a conversation with Frank-Walter Steinmeier last week began. Currently Germany's foreign minister, Steinmeier is also the center-left Social Democratic Party's (SPD) candidate for chancellor in Germany's general elections this September. But apparently, he's more than that -- he's a deep thinker about politics, a leader in taking responsibility and he's absolutely not on the campaign trail. Those are Steinmeier's claims, how he wants to be seen, and it's possibly even how he sees himself.

But is it true? The conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the SPD's major political opponent, doesn't believe a word of it. CDU officials were indignant when Steinmeier recently addressed Opel workers at a demonstration in the western German city of Rüsselsheim. The General Motors subsidiary is threatened with collapse and Steinmeier sought to show his support for workers who might lose their jobs. That's not a foreign minister's job, they said, that's campaigning. And now, seven months before the federal elections, a strange debate has grown up around Steinmeier: What is campaigning and what is serious politics?

The man in question is holding court in his office. There's a long silence -- the foreign minister is thinking, his hands forming a triangle and fingertips pressed together, apparently engaged in deep contemplation. Steinmeier is a man who feels at home in meaningful gestures. It's important to recognize, he says, that he's worked in a grand coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel from the CDU for the past four years. When you've done so, you don't just start attacking one another, he says, you don't start to rant and rave about each other, there's a certain basic respect.

Twenty hours later, it's "political Ash Wednesday," when German politicians traditionally take verbal jabs at their opponents. Steinmeier appears before an audience of 1,500 in the northern port city of Cuxhaven, and his speech seems to have been designed to answer the following question: How can Angela Merkel be made to look small, so small she eventually disappears, without ever actually saying that it's about Angela Merkel?

Steinmeier knows, of course, that the media have been accusing the chancellor of indecisiveness and a lack of leadership. And in Cuxhaven he declares that the Chancellery is not a place to "sit out the crisis." It's necessary, he says, to "show creativity," it's important "not to duck, not to hide." He makes Merkel smaller and smaller, until she disappears entirely. "The bridge is unmanned!" he roars. "It doesn't work that way!"

That's a fairly barbed comment for a political campaign. And for a campaign that's not a campaign, it seems rather strange -- "basic respect" looks somewhat different. But Steinmeier avoids this criticism by never mentioning Merkel's name. He talks about lack of leadership in a more general way, a sort of fundamental way. And it's the listener's own fault if the name "Angela Merkel" pops into his or her head.

The strategy put a definite crimp in Steinmeier's Ash Wednesday appearance. He attacked, but not exactly. He did a service for his party, yet he could still show his face in Merkel's Chancellery afterward. He laughed when the appearance was over, but more out of relief than happiness. The speech wasn't that good. Steinmeier's way of showing his commitment is volume, shouting but otherwise remaining mostly still. It gives an undecided impression, something of a half campaign. Being a statesman fits Steinmeier better.

The foreign minister likes to be pompous in his thoughts and speech, at least in smaller circles. He doesn't just want to protect democracy, it seems, he also wants to reinvent the chancellor's role. In reality, though, Steinmeier isn't like his SPD colleagues within Merkel's cabinet, including Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück and Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who actually have a basic respect for the chancellor. Steinmeier sees her administration as too tactical, planning too much in the short term.

Steinmeier wants to do things very differently, with clear lines, grand strokes and solid leadership. Above all with sincerity, he says again and again. Because we're in a crisis, he adds, people have less patience than usual for power plays.

His talk is convincing, but it's a rhetoric that sounds a lot like Angela Merkel's did four years ago when she announced she wanted to put an end once and for all to political tricks. Honesty was the driving word in her campaign, with Merkel pledging to put an end to political broken promises.

Apparently it's a tendency among challengers to want to reinvent the game -- and then to play it the traditional way after all. Merkel, for one, didn't become the chancellor for reform she had promised voters she would be.

And Steinmeier is already up to his ears in his campaign against Merkel. But he's hiding the fact, instead of carrying out the campaign openly, doing it in quibbling details instead of on a large scale. And so it was that political deep thinker Frank-Walter Steinmeier could be heard complaining vociferously because he wasn't allowed to sit at the Russian president's table during a visit to St. Petersburg, while Merkel was. That incident, last fall, was just one example of an endless struggle over minor matters and small points won or lost. Since Merkel is no slouch in this department either, the two politicians together have turned Germany's foreign policy into a battlefield of nit-picking details.

Steinmeier could have avoided some mild irritation, for example, if he had informed the Chancellery in advance that he planned to appoint Bernd Mützelburg as his envoy to Afghanistan. But he didn't want to. Instead, he enjoyed the headlines afterward -- the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared it "Steinmeier's Coup."

But do these moves add up to an election campaign? No, no, there's still no campaign here. Not even in the debates over whether Erika Steinbach, controversial head of the Federation of German Expellees, should be allowed to sit on the board of a proposed documentation center and memorial for Germans expelled from Poland after World War II. Poland opposed Steinbach's appointment on suspicion of her views being revanchist. Merkel, in typical fashion, put off making a decision, not wanting to alienate either the neighboring country or the conservatives within her own party. Steinmeier was up in arms, saying that Poles might feel "deceived" if Steinbach got the appointment -- all without mentioning the chancellor herself, of course.

But isn't that campaigning? Isn't such a strong word actually a sign of a campaign? In response comes Steinmeier-style silence, again the fingers pressed against each other, again his hands in the triangle that signals important moments. Then comes a measured speech on sensitive German-Polish relations in light of a calamitous history, and how very personally the matter concerns him.

And yet isn't there a little bit, a teeny, tiny, little element of campaigning involved? In Steinmeier's reply, to understand him correctly, he seems to be acknowledging that in his word choice, but really only in his choice of this one little word, there is a certain element, which shouldn't be overstated, a certain element of, well, yes, campaigning.

He continues that journalists always seem to want to pin him down on this. And that it can really make him furious. He was recently in Baghdad, for example, as the first German foreign minister to visit Iraq in 22 years. He gave an interview from Baghdad to German public television's evening news broadcast. And what did the reporter ask him? She asked whether his visit to Iraq was intended as a campaign appearance. He was so mad he shouted, "Nonsense!" and minutes later was still angrily pacing the hotel corridor.

Steinmeier is clearly sensitive, too. His staff keeps track of who writes or says what, and is quick to suspect that someone is campaigning against their candidate. Which makes it look as if Steinmeier's camp is in campaign mode itself.

Of course Steinmeier doesn't have an easy job, juggling his multiple roles, and it's easy to get tripped up. As foreign minister it's essential that he remain a good statesman, and yet as a candidate for chancellor he needs to call Merkel and her policies into question -- otherwise no one will see why he should replace her in September.

What Steinmeier is missing is a confident way of handling his multiple roles, an approach that's decisive and honest. He had every right to address the crisis-stricken Opel workers. But did he have to follow it up with a statement that Opel shouldn't be allowed to "become a battlefield for campaign purposes"?

It's a nice sentiment, but would Opel's SPD-friendly works council really have invited Steinmeier to speak if he weren't running for chancellor? Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück would have made a lot more sense, since he holds the purse strings for the government funds Opel would like access to.

This year, in an election year, it's always about the election campaign. The odd thing is that those words themselves have become so dirty, Steinmeier wants to keep away from them as long as he possibly can. He, like almost everyone, associates campaigning only with political showmanship and a lack of seriousness. And so he's created a policy that's simply another kind of political show -- that of the non-campaign -- and in doing so, has only managed to add another layer of doubt.

If he can't manage to make politics different even now, though, then he could at least give up his strange inhibitions and give the SPD a clear profile for the election. The party is waiting for him to do so.

Creating the campaign instead of hiding the campaign -- that should be Steinmeier's motto. Campaigning can also mean that the candidates present their concepts of how they will fight the financial crisis and how they fundamentally see the government's role. That's precisely what the SPD and CDU did last Friday with their plans to restructure financial markets in the wake of their near collapse.

Then the parties can argue over those proposals, even argue fiercely -- that would be serious politics. And no one could hold it against Frank-Walter Steinmeier if he says he wants to unseat the current chancellor. After all, he does -- he really does.

Incidentally, that chancellor's name is Angela Merkel. Maybe Steinmeier could start to say it as part of a new policy of openness.