Axel Schäfer: A politician as a friend of a journalist

I met most politicians as a journalist. But I got to know one when I wasn’t really a journalist and he wasn’t really politician yet. It was around 35 years ago. A few days ago I took part in his farewell, an interesting experience. To that later.

At the beginning of the 1990s, I accompanied an aid transport to Armenia as a newspaper intern, which was organized by an SPD European MP. Two of their employees flew along. One was called Axel Schäfer, and he had already worked as a speaker for Willy Brandt, which I found impressive. As a young boy, I had played Willy Brandt speeches in the children’s room, of which there is a Super 8 film, but that’s another topic.

Schäfer and I flew to Jerewan with an aeroflot machine and then drove the relief goods together with local forces to the earthquake area in northern Armenia. On one of the long journeys, a tire burst in the middle of the night. Schäfer and I used a second car to get a new tire in the next city. During the excursion, we had to keep the driver from being formulated in a friendly manner, to expose us in the darkness of the mountainous Georgian-Armenian border area and to disappear with the bundle of US dollars, which we had taken for the tire. Axel Schäfer used the persuasiveness, with which he was later elected to a European and then a member of the Bundestag.

Such an experience combines for life, even if a politician and a journalist, if they have to do with each other, do not always agree. Schäfer, who entered the SPD when I was three years old, took part in more than 50 SPD party days and brought it to the deputy group leader as a member of the parliament. He has met many great Social Democrats personally, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the SPD and glows for a united Europe. Schäfer was always a left-wing social democrat, critical, but loyal, trademark: red scarf. He is one of the politicians that journalists do not encounter mistrust from the outset, which is usually an advantage for politicians. And journalists like to call him because he freely announced uncomfortable opinions with increasing parliamentary seniority.

So Axel Schäfer was adopted last week. He no longer runs in his Bochum constituency. Group leader Rolf Mützenich found friendly words for the comrade. Bundestag President Bärbel Bas was also there. As young comrades, she and Schäfer were the only North Rhine-Westphalian Social Democrats at a party congress who spoke out against Bonn and for Berlin as the capital. As a result, a certain bodo Hombach predicted an early end of their federal carpenter, which then did not ironically not Bas and Schäfer, but Hombach.

MPs from other parties also came to Schäfer’s farewell, including Ralph Brinkhaus (CDU), Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU) and Gesine Lötzsch (left). One day after the Union had enforced an application with the AfD under the roar – a small festival of democracy, a non -partisan proof that parliamentarianism not only means conflict, but also collegiality. That had something conciliatory and was a worthy honor for my friend Axel Schäfer.