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Robert Habeck: What the Vice Chancellor has in common with Willy Brandt

Robert Habeck: What the Vice Chancellor has in common with Willy Brandt

Robert Habeck was long considered the shooting star of German politics. But with the Patrick Graichen case, this image is crumbling. Time for a comparative look into the past.

A guest contribution by Stephan-Götz Richter

Robert Habeck was long considered the shooting star of German politics. But suddenly everything is different. Decisive legislative measures appear to have been poorly thought through, and the cost dimension, which is highly relevant for citizens, is carelessly overlooked.

And now, to top it all off, Habeck sees himself caught in the clutches of his state secretary Patrick Graichen’s behavior that was clearly in breach of his duties. He failed to withdraw from a relevant appeals process due to personal bias.

Beyond the current circumstances and incidents, it is worth looking for a parallel in German politics to trace the causes of the current Habeck crisis.

“He can talk well, with calmness and serious intonation, and meets the press with a directness and charm that disarms criticism. He’s photogenic, which is not an unimportant strength in the television age, and he’s very appealing to the all-important female voter. For most Berliners, he seems to embody youthful vitality, courage and sincerity.”

No, we are not talking about Robert Habeck here. As early as 1958, the London Times characterized Willy Brandt, the then mayor of Berlin and later the SPD’s candidate for chancellor.

A comparison of Robert Habeck and Willy Brandt

Like Habeck, Brandt was a man of personal charm and the power of words. He worked as a journalist for a long time. And he wrote books, like Habeck. Brandt was a visionary who knew how to pack politics into stories and set symbols. Just think of his historic kneeling as Chancellor at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial.

Like Habeck, Brandt was a man from the North. He came from Lübeck, was in asylum in Sweden and spoke Swedish – just as Habeck speaks Danish.

Brandt was the perfect fit for the job of chancellor in the late 1960s. The country had frozen in place, maps with the borders from 1937 were still hanging in the schools, and the east was labeled (“under Soviet administration” and “under Polish administration”).

Acknowledging the realities, pursuing reconciliation with Eastern Europe and Russia, daring more democracy – these were Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visionary projects. And nobody could have done it better than him. Brandt was a godsend for Germany in the late 1960s. His political style shaped the country and ultimately gave the SPD the best election result in its history in 1972.

But as early as December 1973, Der Spiegel announced in a cover story “The monument is crumbling”: “The man whose concrete vision of a balanced equilibrium in Europe brought the social-liberal coalition the widely recognized Ostpolitik, doesn’t stick with domestic politics.”

What happened? Global political events whirled the German world upside down. OPEC had drastically curtailed production, oil prices rose, and inflation picked up. It was a political mix that all of a sudden left little room for vision. Brandt, the figure of light, recently awarded the Nobel Prize, became a symbol of decay and was soon replaced by Helmut Schmidt.

What Habeck Brandt has ahead

Of course, all personal analogies have their limits. What is undeniable, however, is that Robert Habeck is more like Willy Brandt than any other German politician since then. And although Habeck, unlike Brandt, recognized how important it is to also be a man of the files in order to understand the background and abysses of regulations more precisely, he made a crucial mistake right from the start in view of the enormous nature of the transformation task of climate protection.

Instead of surrounding himself with a team of hardened administrative professionals who would protect their minister from mistakes and above all from the pitfalls of the matter (and bureaucracy), he surrounded himself with a sworn team of believers. It was easy for them to narrow down the design of central studies in order to implement the agenda they personally favored in such a way that the result was practically certain in advance. This is pure agenda politics, but not proper administration.

The personnel level below the minister is all the more important because Habeck stipulated a very broad portfolio in the coalition negotiations in terms of the ministerial structure. The BMWK is about nothing other than securing the entire industrial and ecological future of Germany.

The case of Patrick Graichen

Patrick Graichen, who is now in the national headlines, might have been a good head of planning, but he doesn’t have the experience profile of a state secretary. Because especially when it comes to such a massive maneuver as the energy policy realignment of one of the largest industrialized countries in the world, one should not operate on the basis of complacent reports, the principle of hope and without safety nets. That’s irresponsible.

The parallel to Willy Brandt is very revealing for Robert Habeck. From 1969 to 1972, he had a “disciplinarian” at his side in Horst Ehmcke, who was head of the Federal Chancellery. When the uncomfortable Ehmcke was replaced by a Brandt loyalist from familiar Berlin felt after the 1972 general election, Brandt quickly went downhill.

Habeck thus lacks a real alter ego that relentlessly protects him from the temptation to succumb to his own charm. In this way, everything seems to be inevitably knitted with a very hot needle – even if Putin’s war of aggression is left out. The doubly monomaniacal thinking – goodbye to nuclear power and heat pumps above all else – arouses great astonishment even in European partner countries that are very concerned about ecological transformation.

Germany of all places – a nation that is based on the principle of caution – suddenly no longer undertakes forward-looking and secure energy requirement planning? And instead tries to save itself in a subsidy spiral, which is very questionable under European law, in order to keep its basic industries?

Source: Stern

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