Berlin – It was hardly noticed that day in Halle. It is also the Chancellor who is at the center at this moment. Angela Merkel has just given her speech at the central celebration of German Unity Day. A remarkable, very personal speech in which she states more clearly than usual that Eastern CVs are still disregarded.
The applause is great, it turns into rhythmic clapping. The Chancellor makes a defensive gesture, but the audience gets up from their seats and carries on. Bodo Ramelow, Thuringia’s Prime Minister of the Left, applauds as well as SPD Chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz, the CDU leader and Federal President Frank-Walter-Steinmeiner.
Only Wolfgang Schäuble does not move a hand. He sits right next to the Federal Chancellor and Federal President – after all, as President of the Bundestag, he represents one of the constitutional organs. He does it that day with a stony face. The unity celebration in Halle is the last that Schäuble will attend as President of the Bundestag. In less than two weeks he will lose his important office and spend his last years as an active politician as a member of the Bundestag for the opposition.
It is quite possible that this is going through his head at the moment when the Chancellor is, so to speak, being adopted. She too will no longer take part in the unity celebration next year, at least not as head of government. But she is going into retirement with a light heart, and may even long for it a little. At the age of 67 you can also think of yourself.
Schäuble is twelve years older and doesn’t like to stop. He planned the next legislative period very differently. For himself and his party. He only flirted briefly with quitting, but then decided to continue for another legislative period. There were voices from the grassroots who asked him to continue, he said. In the Bundestag presidium one had expected it anyway. He as head of the Bundestag, a party friend as head of the Chancellery, that’s how Schäuble wanted to end his career. And not long ago everything looked like that too.
The CDU is winning anyway, he is said to have told his party friends in April, five long months before he has to travel to this unity celebration in Saxony-Anhalt. In those spring days, it is about the candidacy for chancellor and the question of who will stand now – Armin Laschet, the new party leader of the CDU, or Markus Söder, the power-conscious CSU chairman.
The climax of the dispute takes place on a Sunday evening in the Bundestag at night. Only Söder, Laschet and the general secretaries of both parties take part in the clandestine meeting. And Wolfgang Schäuble. He directed the others here. Söder arrives in a hurry with a private jet. Here, it is said later, it is made clear to him that the CDU does not accept a CSU candidate for chancellor. Here Schäuble is said to have said the sentence: “We will win anyway.” And that it is therefore important for the CDU that the Chancellor comes from their party.
Five months later the election is lost. Now the SPD represents the strongest parliamentary group in the Bundestag – and has the right to propose the office of Bundestag President. Or the President of the Bundestag. It is quite possible that it will be a woman. What is certain is that it will by no means be Wolfgang Schäuble. From his circle one now hears that his role in the decision on the candidacy for chancellor was by no means as central as it is spread.
At the Junge Union’s Germany Day in Münster, the failed campaigner Armin Laschet has now publicly stated this again. According to Laschet, it is a legend that Schäuble decided who would be the candidate. He had invited for a conversation. “But it was not he who wrote this candidate for chancellor,” says Laschet, who once again takes full responsibility for the Union’s electoral defeat.
The party has started to come to terms with the historic setback of September 26th. If you will, the first phase of denial is now over, it is now about responsibility. And about the consequences that have to be drawn. Some younger politicians called for Schäuble to take responsibility early on.
Emmi Zeulner, for example. The CSU politician defended her direct mandate with the best first vote result in Bavaria and already said on the day after the election that the candidate for chancellor had been “worked out in the back room” and that Schäuble had strongly influenced the Union. “These are decision-making processes like a hundred years ago,” she told Bayerischer Rundfunk. That’s just criticism from the CSU, counter many CDU politicians when asked. Hardly anyone can be quoted by name these days. Laschet’s candidacy was voted on in the federal executive board, it is said that it is not a back room, but an elected body. Schäuble is a member of the federal board. He did not need an election for this, but is due to his office as President of the Bundestag. If he loses it, he pretty much loses everything.
Schäuble himself doesn’t want to talk about his disappointment. He’s hardly giving any interviews at the moment. This Monday one will appear in parliament, the newspaper that the Bundestag publishes. Of course, the boss is not asked any uncomfortable questions. The issue of loss of office is excluded. In the conversation, Schäuble said that he was looking forward to the day of the constituent session of the Bundestag “with a certain calmness”. It is the 14th such constitution that he has witnessed – but possibly his bitterest.
The colleagues in the Bundestag Presidium react sympathetically. “A lot will be asked of him when he, as senior president, moderates the election of his or her successor,” says Bundestag Vice-President Wolfgang Kubicki. Like Schäuble, Kubicki has been in the Bundestag Presidium for one legislative period. We have learned to appreciate each other, he says, and the cooperation was very good. “He has an intelligent and profound sense of humor,” says the FDP politician and tells how he once suggested to Schäuble in jest that one of the planned buildings could be named after him, Kubicki, head of the spatial and building commission. Schäuble then said that they might find a toilet for it. Kubicki laughs loudly over the phone as he recounts the episode.
Kubicki: “He quickly became a parliamentarian”
Kubicki believes that Schäuble vigorously represented the Bundestag vis-à-vis the government. “He came from the government, but he quickly became a parliamentarian.”
Claudia Roth also says this. The Green politician had already been Vice President of the Bundestag for one legislative period when Schäuble took office in 2017. After many years in various government offices, that was of course a change of lane, she says. Schäuble did it quickly and credibly. “He increasingly found desire and passion for the office of president and lived the importance of parliament.”
Kubicki reports on a trip to Moscow that he made with the then Vice-President Thomas Oppermann, because it is a good example of how Schäuble defended the self-confidence of the parliament against the federal government. Kubicki said the government had expressed concerns about this trip to visit counterparts in the Russian Duma. Schäuble only said that the government would not let the government dictate what parliament should do.
How long will Schäuble stay in the Bundestag?
Kubicki does not believe that Schäuble will now spend the entire legislative period in the Bundestag. Claudia Roth disagrees. “I assume so,” she says. “He won his constituency directly and has been for many years. He feels obliged to his voters and he has enormous political experience. It’s a cheek that the Junge Union in Bavaria demands that he give back his mandate, as Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer and Peter Altmaier did. “
Kubicki and Roth are certain that he will use the office of senior president at the constituent session on October 26 for another haunting speech. The fact that he at least gets this opportunity is due to a trick that was used to prevent Alexander Gauland as retirement president in 2017, who is a year older than Schäuble. It is now the case that it is no longer the oldest at birth, but the most senior member of the MP who becomes the age president. And in terms of parliamentary years, no one can come close to Schäuble.
In 1972 he won his constituency of Offenburg directly for the first time. So in the coming year Schäuble will be a professional politician for half a century. Nobody has done that before.
At that time he was 30 years old and yet not the youngest in the Bundestag. “It’s not like that there weren’t any younger MPs before,” he said in an interview with parliament. Let the boys of today see that they don’t have a unique selling point on everything. Shortly before the election, Schäuble said in an interview that young people “also need a bit of resistance”. So you can well imagine that, among other things, he will make that his task in the group. Experience versus departure – that could lead to some interesting confrontations in the Union faction. Certainly Schäuble will not be modest, not back in line, as is probably expected of the newcomers in the Bundestag. Decades in political leadership do not make anyone more cautious. “He is a political alpha animal,” says Claudia Roth.
Wolfgang Schäuble has probably made the greatest sacrifice a politician can make to the Federal Republic. After appearing in an election campaign in the fall of 1990, he was seriously injured by five gunshots. Since then he has been in a wheelchair. His recovery took many months. At that time, he missed the constituent session of the first all-German Bundestag. But he fights back and later takes on strenuous government offices again. The many journeys as finance minister, for example, have a negative impact on his constitution. He still holds out. Until he declares himself that this is the end of it.
The political circumstances are now forcing him to leave the office of President of the Bundestag. From his point of view, this is probably a rather silly defeat.
.