Captain of industry

Date: 17/04/1997

IF THE main aim of the European Commission's activity was to generate Euro-friendly media coverage, Martin Bangemann should probably pick up his hat and go.

Few politicians have managed to push their careers to such giddy heights as the EU's Industry Commissioner while generating such a barrage of personal criticism in their home country's press.

Germany's normally ponderous newspapers love to take aim at Bonn's former economics minister, frequently painting him as a crony of big business, using his office to sustain a lifestyle long on expensive pleasures and short on hard work.

Yet talk to erstwhile collaborators and other Commission insiders and you will hear Bangemann described as one of the institution's smoothest political operators, combining a brilliant mind, a quicksilver wit and great personal charm to secure broad support for most initiatives he submits to his peers.

“Whenever Bangemann sets his mind and heart on a dossier, the likelihood of its failing to win the Commission's approval is extremely small”, says a close observer.

“He is brilliant at bringing Commissioners on his side, which makes him one of the most influential behind-the-scenes movers in the institution.”

Officials who have worked with the 62-year-old German testify to his concern for political aides and other colleagues, characterising him as a rather thoughtful man of marked intellectual tastes, endowed with a strong sense of kin and a complete lack of pomposity.

“I remember an occasion when he gave each of us a book that he thought would personally appeal to us as a Christmas gift, and being struck with the aptness of his choices,” says one aide. “When he is abroad, he loves nothing more than to browse around in bookshops.”

While many politicians are confirmed workaholics who use their families mostly as a backdrop for photo opportunities, Bangemann, who has five children, “is actually a very fond father and grandfather, and loves to escape the Brussels treadmill to spend time with his big family”, says one aide.

The Commissioner owes his remarkable lack of popularity with much of his country's media to a complex cocktail of interconnecting factors, many of which have to do with the make-up of Germany's political psyche, while others go back to the man himself.

An analysis of the woes which began to beset him in the years of his leadership of Germany's tiny Liberal Party from 1984 to 1988 reveals a politician who owes much of his troubled image to his irrepressible penchant for speaking out of turn.

Throughout decades of public appearances, the loquacious Bangemann has often been unwilling or unable to deny himself the indulgence of incautious jokes or abrasive outbursts, shocking his supporters while giving his critics a field-day.

During his time as his country's economics minister, Bangemann single-handedly provoked a series of diplomatic and political incidents which in turn unsettled financial markets, irritated Germany's allies and embarrassed his political friends.

“I know how you meant it, but you should not have said it,” perennial Foreign Minister Hans-Dietriech Genscher, the doyen of German Liberals, once reportedly said after Bangemann had quipped he was just as well equipped to do the job as the Liberal patriarch.

In countries such as France and the UK, the Commissioner's love of off-the-cuff remarks, enhanced by an ability to engage in witty repartee in German, French and English, might have earned him high marks with journalists looking to their politicians to provide them with some entertainment as well as steering the ship of state.

But in earnest-minded, politically ultracorrect Germany, a politician unable to resist the temptation of free speech in public runs the risk of being credited with a lack of gravitas and responsibility.

While his linguistic incontinence contributed to undermine his position as party leader, Bangemann's similarly uninhibited espousal of big business interests made him one of the bugbears of the ecologically-minded German left in the 1980s.

His credentials as a former defender of radical left-wingers in the late Sixties - an activity which established the young lawyer's name in politics - were swept aside or forgotten as Bangemann helped steer Germany's liberals towards a resolute course of support for the country's big industrial conglomerates.

Bangemann has never bothered to hide his conviction that there is no intrinsic evil in industrial activity, and that Germans' exceptionally strong apprehensions about new technologies such as genetical engineering verge on the hysterical.

And while other prominent German politicians have managed to turn their considerable bulk into the embodiment of all that is homely and reassuring, Bangemann's visible love of earthly pleasures strikes many of his more puritanical countrymen as suspiciously close to gluttony.

While Conservative politicians in France and the UK may inherit or acquire country houses and other bourgeois comforts without fear of voters' censure, their German counterparts usually take great pains to model their material lifestyle closely on that of 'Joe Public'.

Yet, in another sign of his disregard for such conventions, Bangemann has acquired a comfortable if unspectacular country retreat in western France, promptly described as a many-roomed château by the less-than-benevolent press.

Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl, to whose support Bangemann owes his current and last term as a Commission member, has been known to quip pointedly about senior Brussels officials preferring to relax under foreign skies rather than sell Europe to Germany's increasingly sceptical citizens.

All this has cast a shadow over a man genuinely committed to integrating Europe politically and strengthening its industry's ability to compete in the global market.

Bangemann, who has become one of the institution's veterans since he joined the Commission in 1989, is one of the few Commissioners to have come to Brussels with long-established European credentials.

As Germany's Liberal Party's top-of-the-list candidate in the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, Bangemann played a key role in the assembly's early years, welding together the Liberal Group over which he was chosen to preside, into an effective political force.

As is true for many German politicians of his generation, Bangemann, who was born the son of a locksmith in eastern Germany's province of Sachsen-Anhalt but grew up after 1945 in eastern Frisonia close to the Dutch border, draws his strong pro-European convictions from his direct childhood experiences of the chaos and the horrors of the Second World War.

In November 1992, his pronouncement that the Maastricht Treaty was an important step on the road to a federal European state - made just before a key UK parliament vote on the subject - drew an angry rebuke from the British government.

Yet this did not deter the Commissioner from coming up with a repeat performance in May 1993.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bangemann reiterated his remark shortly before Denmark's highly sensitive referendum on the treaty, sowing dismay and anger in the anxious ranks of the Danish cabinet.

In his last years at the helm of the Commission's powerful industry directorate-general, Bangemann, who was instrumental in shaping the single market during his first term as a Commissioner, has focused much of his energy on raising public and political awareness of the challenge of the information society.

The Commissioner has become an apostle of the electronic revolution and is one of the driving forces behind countless conferences dealing with the subject.

Ever the moderniser, Bangemann is spending the last years of his political life as a passionate advocate of technological change.

The round-the-world tour which the keen sailor and former champion oarsman had mapped out for his retirement, originally planned for 1993, will have to wait until the new millenium.