Serap Güler is the first at the vaccination appointment in Cologne-Mülheim. The 40-year-old, who as Chancellor would presumably make Armin Laschet the first Federal Integration Minister, poses in the focal area for photos with Cologne’s Lord Mayor Henriette Reker, chats in Turkish with helpers wearing headscarves, says to the television cameras what she has been saying to the television cameras for weeks: How It is important to clarify when vaccinating that it is a matter of vaccinating socially disadvantaged people (not “migrants”) at an early stage, that offers like this are exemplary. Dozens of people are waiting for the injection in front of the vaccination bus. Serap Guler gives everyone a smile.
When Karl Lauterbach drives up two days later in a black Mercedes station wagon, nobody is waiting. He himself has to wait a moment, flanked by two bodyguards, because everyone is surprised that he is there. Lauterbach, 58, often comes unannounced. Not only, but also because he regularly receives death threats. Ever since he started explaining the dangers of the coronavirus and the need for lockdowns on a daily basis. He rushes into the vaccination bus, asks if he can vaccinate someone, is given an injection, says a few sentences to the perplexed woman about the effectiveness of the Johnson & Johnson preparation, and says goodbye to the doctors. If Mülheim district mothers whose funding is running out promises help, takes a selfie with a refugee who has not yet been recognized, and makes a phone call. Check some fists and elbows, hurry out. It’s Sunday and he’s about to have an online scientific panel, an interview with the Today’s Journal, in between he meets his mother, later his buddy Günter Wallraff. There are 26 minutes left for a conversation.
Lauterbach has always won the direct mandate in the “Leverkusen / Cologne IV” constituency since 2005 and never less than 37 percent. Guler, State Secretary for Integration in North Rhine-Westphalia, has never been directly elected to the state parliament. She will move into the Bundestag with the secure eighth place on the list even if she does not win the constituency – this does not apply to Karl Lauterbach with 23rd place on the list, at least not without a miraculous SPD comeback until September 26th.
For his task as a corona pandemic declarer and national conscience, the SPD has neither assigned nor provided the Cologne epidemiologist and Harvard professor Lauterbach with personnel. He does it of his own accord. When asked why he, as the most prominent and well-known person in his party, did not get a secure place on the list, he said: “No comment. I do not comment on that. “
Now that he has taken off the FFP-2 mask with the second layer of cellulose and is sweating on a stone bench in the midday sun, one could read something sour at the corners of his mouth, and his tone of voice was a slight resentment. Perhaps he just finds the question as unnecessary as any party clique – after all, he knows that human fishing is not his job; that he has no power base in the SPD and never will, because he prefers to read studies, talk to scientists, write bills, play table tennis and speak his mind on talk shows.
He wanted to be the head of the SPD
Lauterbach is also familiar with defeats: When he and the environmental expert Nina Scheer took on the fight for the SPD chairmanship, he was so elated during the election campaign that he felt close to victory and one of them Spiegel-Reportage also believed that the chancellorship was possible. He then clearly failed. It is part of his nature that he has got up again and that he is not challenged by the party’s lack of support.
The boyish looking Lauterbach looks a bit worn out on this June Sunday. He blinks a lot, his otherwise carefully combed hair is slightly disheveled. He was recently absent from talk shows for a week or more, and he did not post on Twitter. People began to worry – until he tweeted that he hadn’t tweeted for a few days because of an eye surgery. He doesn’t want to say anything about the condition of his eyes, but about his ambitions. “Of course I would like to become Minister of Health and I also believe that I could do it very well.” Regarding the prospects of the SPD’s renewed participation in government, Lauterbach says: “There are still 100 days left, that’s a lot.” He doesn’t want to say anything about Serap Guler .
While taking a walk on the banks of the Rhine in Mülheim, Güler says that “During the pandemic, Lauterbach is acting much more as an epidemiologist than as a politician”. But there are “also in Mülheim many people who are affected by short-time work or who have no work at all. They need more than just epidemiological advice ”. In between she smokes a cigarette and puts it out on the pavement. You can imagine them with kebab in the left and Kölsch in the right in the election campaign. Lauterbach advocates a sugar tax, warns against consuming meat and, according to legend, has not eaten salt for ages.
Both come from working-class families. Güler’s story – father in the mining industry, mother wearing a headscarf housewife, training as a hotel clerk, studying German and communication sciences, she works her way up to becoming a state secretary – emphasize her supporters from the Union as an exemplary integration narrative that sometimes it almost hurts. Lauterbach’s father was a foreman and a tough guy, he himself initially at secondary school, later he studied at Harvard. He incidentally lists a few stages in his academic career, which he – kind regards to Ms. Baerbock – “would not write on my résumé”.
Guler is also self-confident – but otherwise in many ways an alternative to Karl Lauterbach, approachable (and yet friendly, distant). At the beginning of her political career. Closely networked in the CDU and corporate circles. Armin Laschet paved her way into politics and introduced her to many important people. She met the CDU candidate for chancellor at an event by Cem Özdemir at the University of Cologne, calls Laschet a “sponsor, mentor and friend”. As a relatively young woman, Guler stands out from the inner circle of power of the CDU chief and NRW prime minister, which is essentially made up of older men who are loyal to him.
In these weeks, like Lauterbach, she is present on all channels: Guler is the first to fire on Twitter after the CDU in southern Thuringia nominated Georg Maaßen as a candidate for the Bundestag: “Didn’t you hear the bang? How can you be so crazy and just throw Christian democratic values overboard? ”She talks to her time over measure and their fight against racism. She was sent to help Maischberger Laschet to defend against Markus Söder. She speaks and smiles at Markus Lanz and with Ingo Zamperoni in the Daily Topics. Sometimes it looks like the rhetorically bumpy candidate prefers to send his model student. Guler, who started as a speechwriter and speaker at Laschet, has long been the most important woman in his shadow cabinet.
She wants to become a minister
She is also compatible because her positions cover a spectrum from very cosmopolitan to very conservative: Guler is in favor of dual citizenship and against abortion, has campaigned for a headscarf ban up to the age of 14 and against an alliance between the CDU and the Greens, she is for more social housing and against higher taxes. If you ask them “yellow or green?”, Serap Guler shouts “yellow!”, Almost indignantly. And smiles.
When Lauterbach, who says that “the only sympathetic party besides the SPD are the Greens”, is asked to smile for a photo, the result is a slightly tortured grimace. He and the environmental expert Nina Scheer had focussed the campaign for his fight for the SPD chairmanship on climate policy and overtook the Greens on the ecological left. Presumably his lack of approachability and party stale smell prevented him from becoming SPD boss and also from being nominated as an OB candidate in Cologne, and this lack will probably prevent him from becoming health minister at some point. Although he not only says of himself that he is “on the right footing in terms of content”, the majority of Germans also consider him to be more competent than Jens Spahn.
Karl Lauterbach, say people from the political scene in Cologne and Berlin, is analytically brilliant, but also stubborn, sometimes opinionated. One comrade describes him as “incredibly hardworking and competent, he only lives for work”. Probably no politician has introduced more laws in recent years. “There are more than 80”, says Karl Lauterbach himself, in his own pressed tone.
Güler is described by party colleagues from Düsseldorf and Cologne as “career-oriented”, “ambitious”, “emotional”, “resolute”, “self-confident”, “dominant” and “good at networking”. In January, the SPD parliamentary group in the state parliament accused her of having taken networking too far – her private and party friend Emitis Pohl had received a lucrative contract from Güler’s ministry with her PR agency. The clique allegations could not be proven. She stayed out of it because she was self-conscious, says Guler. “Everything went absolutely clean here and I am fine with my conscience.” Florian Braun, CDU member of the state parliament, says: “Serap Guler is far too intelligent to be guilty of anything.”
Allegations by right-wing journalists that she is close to the right-wing extremist Turkish group “Gray Wolves” because she once attended an event that was organized by their functionaries upset Guler. She has repeatedly called for a ban on the gray wolves and continues to do so today. “To assume that I am close to them is downright perfidious. I have often received death threats from Turkish nationalists and Islamists. “
Karl Lauterbach reported on Twitter that he accidentally reported additional income from four lectures two months later. “A huge mistake for which I am responsible,” he wrote, adding to the admission by announcing that the lecture fee would be donated “for India”. Lauterbach is a frequent twitterer, he has already posted almost 8,500 posts to the news service. He tweets the vaccination appointment in Mülheim as well as the information that grilled meat causes ten times more greenhouse gases than vegetarian alternatives and that he has not eaten meat for 33 years. Lauterbach takes no account of possibly alienating meat eaters with such posts. In this case, he also refrains from specifying which “vegetarian alternatives” are involved.
Serap Güler uses Twitter similarly, but differently: If she sees an open flank, as in the nomination of the CDU right wing Maaßen in Thuringia, she pokes in. Otherwise she promotes her interviews and her party friends, especially Armin Laschet, and positions herself against racism and anti-Semitism, likes to shoot against Baerbock or Habeck. “The hype surrounding Ms. Baerbock reminds me of Martin Schulz,” she says while walking along the Rhine. “I am very convinced that Laschet will become Chancellor.” And then Minister of Integration? “Why not?”
Lauterbach, sweating on the Mülheim market square, says that he will “do what I’ve always done after the election”. To do this, he does not necessarily have to be in the Bundestag.
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