Jacob Christensen

This may not have reached the transatlantic media yet, but today the SPD accidentially lost its chairman Franz Müntefering.

The party’s executive committee voted on candidates for the post as General Secretary (which is less prominent as one might think, the G.S.’s main task is to organise electoral campaigning; it’s the Party Secretary which deals with the day-to-day workings of the party organisation) and the left-wing candidate Andrea Nahles won against Münteferings candidate Kajo Wasserhövel.

It was already considered a minor scandal that Nahles – who is the most prominent left-winger in the party – ran against the candidate put forward by the party chairman, but her victory led Müntefering to announce that he would resign his post at the party convention in two weeks’ time. Müntefering also said that he would probably not enter the new cabinet.

This leaves the SPD without a chairman and a vice-chancellor for the incoming government and German media are guessing intensely about possible successors.

Kurt Beck (PM in Rheinland-Pfaltz) and Matthias Platzeck (PM in Brandenburg) have been mentioned but unsurprisingly, no-one has yet declared any direct interest in taking up the position.

Meanwhile in Munich, rumours have it that Edmund Stoiber are reconsidering his position. If the chairman of the SPD – when the party elects one – is not going to be a member of the new cabinet, the he allegedly does not want to leave his post as PM in Bavaria.

In other words: Just another day at the office.

Trouble between the CDU and the CSU
The CSU were hoping to fill the Interior or the Defense portfolio, Angela Merkel is reported to have said that given the limited number of portfolios available to the CDU, both are out of bounds for the CSU. But they can have Agriculture.

Horst Seehofer is not that popular everywhere in the CDU. An anonynous source is quoted as saying: “With Stoiber and Seehofer, we would have ten Social Democrats in the cabinet”. Germans can have a sense of humour.

Trouble within the CSU
One reason Soiber had set his eyes on Interior might have been in order to place Günther Beckstein on that portfolio and at the same time leaving the post as Prime Minister in Bayern to Erwin Huber. If the CSU doesn’t get Interior, then the battle for the PM’s chair in Munich is indeed very much on.

Not everyone in Bayern are happy about Horst Seehofer. Too much to the left in economic and labour market policy, some think.

The coalition agreement
According to Financial Times Deutschland (what a title for a newspaper…!) the agreement is to be confirmed by all parties on party conferences on November 14. Now, what happens if one party fails to pass it after the chancellor has been elected?

And by the way
On the Podcast of Deutschlandradio, I happened to hear a truly German discussion about how to fill Government portfolios. The host of the morning programme interviewed a political scientist who had to explain that portfolios in the modern world are filled according to political and managerial merits, not merits within the field of the portfolio. The perculiar German conception of “true expertise” as “Sachverstand” (and I honestly don’t know how to translate that into English…) still lingers on.

There are some brief, but interesting portraits of the ministerial hopefuls on the homepage of the Tagesschau

Maybe worth noticing:
Frank Walter Steinmeyer (Now: Minister in the Office of the Chancellor, may be designed for the Foreign Office) is affectionately known as “Der Kanzlerflüsterer” (The Chancellor-Whisperer). He is not well known to a larger public but definitively one of Schröder’s closest advisers. So, yes, probably the closest one can get to having Schröder in the cabinet without actually having Schröder in the cabinet.

Horst Seehofer (CSU) was Minister of Health between 1992 and 1998 and one of two Union politicians tipped for the Family Ministry. What is interesting – and what I should have known – is that he supports the idea of introducing a Bürgerversicherung, i.e. a general public health insurance instead of the present segmented system, and that actually puts him closer to the SPD than the CDU – even if heath insurance isn’t under the Family portfolio.

With regard to Ursula von der Leyen – the CDU-hopeful for that portfolio – then her policy positions are less clear which is partly due to the fact that she only entered politics in 2001. It is mentioned that she participated in a CDU-workgroup on “Women, Family and Work” and that that work brought her to Angela Merkel’s attention. I looked at one of her articles and she does at least seem sympathetic to the idea of combining family and work, so maybe you could put her on the moderate left (in Germany, that is…) with regard to equal rights. It is mentioned that some in the CDU of Niedersachsen are uneasy about the idea of having her as minister in Berlin – too much of a lightweight, too dependent of Christian Wulff (?). And maybe also the … erm … genetic element?

The Finance Minister-designate Peer Steinbrück was head of the state government in Nordrhein-Westphalen between 2002 and 2005 and before that had a career on the state government level (both Schleswig-Holstein and Nordrhein-Westphalen). He has a somewhat technocratic reputation, but what may be worth noting is that he seems to have a good working relationship with the head of the state government in Hessen, Roland Koch (CDU), especially with regard to economic and industrial policy. Koch will not be going to Berlin, but is definitively one of the heavyweights within the CDU.

Note: This post was originally written as an e-mail for a colleague on October 13, 2005. It is posted here for purely historical reasons.