Kohl’s iron crown prince

Date: 01/08/1996

BY any possible measure, the German politician Wolfgang Schäuble is a remarkable man.

His ruthless efficiency, biting tongue and razor-sharp thinking have made Schäuble the terror of many of his colleagues in the Bundestag's joint parliamentary group of Christian Democrats and Bavarian Christian Socialists, which he has run since November 1991.

Although the position does not rank highly in the official protocol of state, the job arguably makes Schäuble the most important power broker in Germany after Chancellor Helmut Kohl himself.

Schäuble's mission is to make sure that Kohl can rely on the automatic backing of the Bundestag's members of the Christlich Demokratische Union (CDU) and the Bavarian Christlich Soziale Union (CSU), and to warn him of any signs of unrest.

It bears witness to Schäuble's skills that in almost five years since he took over, the CDU/CSU group has not once seriously threatened a rebellion of any real importance.

For although German MPs are not quite as independent-minded as some Eurosceptical British parliamentarians, they are far more apt to deliver a stinging parliamentary defeat to their own government than, for example, their generally pliable French counterparts.

Newcomers to the Bundestag still shiver at the memory of how their softly-spoken group chairman seized the first possible opportunity to make it clear to them that although they might theoretically embody the voice of the people, they had better, in practice, follow that of Kohl.

His impatience with what he perceives as stupidity and his ability to utter words which hurt, have made Schäuble a man feared by political opponents and friends alike.

“He comes across as a cold man with a strong sense of self-control, who can appear to be completely without emotions,” says one close observer.

An incident which changed the life of a man who used to be a keen jogger and prided himself on his trimness - a quality not usually associated with German politicians - has made Schäuble even more impressive to friends, and more terrifying to foes.

In October 1990, Schäuble, who was at that time heading the powerful ministry of the interior, was shot twice by a mentally-disturbed attacker. One of the bullets hit him in the face, the other in his spinal chord, depriving him the use of his legs.

As soon as the first shock waves over the assassination attempt receded, most observers believed that Schäuble would do everything in his power to resume his political career.But few expected him to return to the political fray while still undergoing rehabilitation, impatiently brushing aside efforts to keep him from returning to a 16-hour working day.

When Kohl entrusted his long-time ally with the key job of presiding (or, some would say, ruling) over the CDU/CSU Bundestag group, there were many in Bonn who doubted that even Schäuble would be up to the task.

As opposed to a ministerial appointment, where part of the workload can easily be delegated without attracting too much attention, the leadership of a parliamentary group requires great effort and gruelling hours of work.

But barely a year after the assassination attempt, Schäuble took over and was in charge, his expressionless face only rarely revealing the pain and fatigue which everybody knew must be racking his half-paralysed body.

The willpower shown by a man who would allow sudden tragedy neither to bend nor mellow him has, in the eyes of some observers, endowed Schäuble with an almost super-human quality.

“He has been where few of us will ever go and has come back showing very few signs of it,” says one insider. “In some ways, it seems to have made him even more remote.”

But Schäuble's most remarkable feature is neither his efficiency nor his iron self-control.

In the eyes of some Bonn observers, his most amazing achievement is his ability to remain politically alive and strong, despite the fact that his name is now regularly mentioned as that of Kohl's unofficial crown prince designate and most likely successor.

The chancellor, who professes publicly not to be unduly upset about younger men eager to displace him, shows equal equanimity when stating that he sees it as his job to clip their wings.

“It's quite natural really,” Kohl likes to explain. “The lieutenant wants to become a captain, the captain a colonel, the colonel a lieutenant-colonel and so forth. But when the brigadier wants to become a general, that is when I step in.”

The efficiency of the chancellor's approach has been demonstrated at periodic intervals throughout the last 15 years of German political history.

Whenever one of his barons dared open rebellion, he soon found that his power-base was mysteriously slipping away. Come the next serious crisis or inner-party bid for re-election, he found that he had fewer supporters than ever before, and many of them suddenly lost their jobs.

The last politician before Schäuble who dared let himself be mentioned in the media as a possible successor to Kohl was Defence Minister Volker Rühe.

But following a flurry of favourable profiles in the national and international press, the popular Rühe, to many people's surprise, barely made it to the Party presidium at the Christian Democrat's national congress.

The warning shot was clearly heard. Rühe, a heavy-handed northern German, will still occasionally voice an independent opinion. But reports about his political ambitions no longer appear in print.

The careless mistake made by his former cabinet colleague is almost certainly one the Bundestag chairman would never be foolish enough to repeat.

Not once has Schäuble shown his hand and revealed an interest in the chancellor's job, or indeed even hinted at any eagerness for the man who has steered Germany for the last 15 years to step down and let someone else try his hand at the helm.

Yet almost everybody suspects Schäuble of having enough ambition to want to go for the top job.

His absolute and unfailing public loyalty to Kohl, while almost certainly based on respect, is seen by many as another sign of the intelligent self-control of a man who has learned from the German leader that in politics, premature action, however tempting, is almost always worse than no action at all.

Yet while nobody doubts Schäuble's discipline, authority and intelligence - with the successful negotiation of the German unification treaty in 1991 alone enough to secure him a place in German history books - there are many who are filled with unease by the idea of a Chancellor Schäuble.

For he is one of the few top-level German politicians who openly assert that patriotic emotion and national feeling should be given greater prominence in the political debate, and can be used to strengthen a nation's cohesion in times of crisis or tension.

In most countries, such statements would seem so obvious that few would even bother to make them. But in Germany, where the appeal to patriotism has been used to facilitate the mass murder of millions, these words still have a different ring.

A number of Social and Christian Democrats felt Schäuble was giving fresh respectability to a belief which should belong firmly in the past, and wondered whether he was merely fishing for the far-right vote - to balance the impact of a chancellor intent on destroying the nation state - or expressing a deeply-held personal belief.

It is typical of the mystery shrouding Schäuble and the scepticism he can trigger that even fellow politicians could not say whether his statements were more than just the consequence of an electoral gamble.

However, in public and private statements, the 53-year-old lawyer has always religiously stuck to the credo of European integration and vigorously argued for the transfer of sovereignty from national capitals to Brussels.

Optimists hope that if Kohl were to retire halfway through the new parliament's term after another victory in 1998 (a scenario many believe to be possible) and hand power to Schäuble, he would know what he was doing.

It is unlikely, they say, that Kohl would allow a man who would not continue to pursue his European dream to be his successor.