The
young, gay, conservative German chancellor-in-waiting
Jens
Spahn is positioning himself, with no apologies, to take Angela
Merkel’s seat.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
5/12/16, 5:33 AM CET
BERLIN — Jens
Spahn is a walking contradiction who just might be the answer to
Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats’ biggest and mostly unspoken
problem: What to do the day that Angela Merkel passes from the scene.
As a young, openly
gay man who has built up credibility on serious policy areas such as
finance and health, the 35-year-old Spahn has the potential to
rejuvenate the aging party and broaden its appeal — while keeping
its conservative core satisfied.
The CDU and its
Bavarian sister party, the CSU, sank to four-year lows in opinion
polls in April, opening the door a crack to challengers. Merkel is
accused by her conservative critics of taking the party too far to
the left with her migration, energy and social policies. While there
is little doubt that 61-year-old Merkel will seek a fourth term in
federal elections in 2017, some younger CDU stars are cautiously
putting themselves forward as conservative alternatives.
“Sometimes,
you have to make yourself really unpopular before being taken
seriously” — Jens Spahn, quoting Konrad Adenauer
Spahn, who is
currently deputy finance minister, certainly doesn’t lack the
ambition to one day make a bid for the top job. He joined the CDU
youth wing at the age of 15 and ran for the Bundestag (lower house of
parliament) seven years later, telling an interviewer at the time
that he planned to “to crawl all the way up to the front in
Berlin.”
He won a seat. Asked
14 years later about that youthful display of raw ambition, he told
POLITICO: “As (post-war chancellor Konrad) Adenauer allegedly once
said: ‘Sometimes, you have to make yourself really unpopular before
being taken seriously.’ ”
CDU insiders say the
chancellor finds Spahn loud and self-confident to the point of
impudence. Wolfgang Schäuble, the 73-year-old finance minister,
doesn’t care for Spahn’s bumptious nature, according to party
members — but made him his deputy last year anyway, and appreciates
how well-prepared he is for meetings and his willingness to tackle
budget offenders head-on.
Spahn is
unsentimental when talking about the revered minister 38 years his
senior. “The idea of role models is of no use for me,” he said in
an interview in Berlin. “Schäuble is someone everybody can learn a
lot from. The man became minster for the first time when I was
four-years-old. He’s left his mark on German politics for decades.”
Despite the
adulation he receives from German conservatives, Schäuble missed his
chance at the leadership when Helmut Kohl decided to run for a fifth
term as chancellor in 1998 — and lost. Spahn has other plans.
Hand-in-hand
There was a moment,
after the 2013 elections, when Spahn appeared to have peaked too
soon. Convinced after Merkel’s reelection victory that he would be
named health minister, Spahn was left to stew in the position he had
already had for four years, as the conservatives’ spokesman on
health policy in the Bundestag.
He bounced back in
spectacular style: By the CDU national convention in December 2014,
he had built enough backing to bid for a seat on the executive
committee, the decision-making inner circle of the CDU.
His speech began
like those of the other candidates, reeling off conservative clichés
about “the party of hard-working people,” and the applause was
suitably tepid.
Then he took a
breath. There must be no compromising of Germany’s central values,
he said. The congress center in Cologne expected yet another defense
of Christian culture in the face of what many conservatives perceive
as a threat to Western values from Muslim immigrants.
“Here’s why this
topic is so important to me,” Spahn finally said, raising his
voice. “I don’t ever want to experience another attack or insults
when I walk through Berlin hand-in-hand with my boyfriend.”
The speech won loud
applause and helped secure Spahn one of the seven seats on the
executive committee, ousting, of all people, the man who had beat him
to the health ministry job.
Spahn appeals to
both conservatives and progressives by insisting that immigrants
embrace values like tolerance. A party that traditionally catered to
rural Catholics who are dying out at the rate of about a million
every election cycle, the CDU badly needs to boost its appeal to
young metropolitans who like Merkel’s progressive ideas like ending
conscription, phasing out nuclear power and defending a
Willkommenskultur towards Syrian refugees.
At the same time,
the party is trying to stem the loss of right-wing voters to the
fast-growing, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD).
“If being
‘conservative’ is about preserving certain principles and values
that characterize a society — possibly in a new form, as
circumstances have changed — I certainly am a conservative,”
Spahn said.
Be afraid
Spahn’s
homosexuality makes some older CDU politicians squirm, as they grasp
for euphemisms to describe his “family situation” or speak of
him, like one delegate at the last party congress, as “a pleasant
homosexual.”
This isn’t a role
Spahn wants to be reduced to, but he sees no contradiction in being a
gay conservative, recalling David Cameron’s celebrated remark that
he defended same-sex marriage not despite being a Conservative, but
“because I am a Conservative.”
Since speaking
publicly about his sexuality for the first time in a 2012 interview,
Spahn — who dresses soberly in dark suits — takes his partner, a
journalist, to formal events, tweeting selfies from meetings with
pillars of the conservative establishment.
Other leading CDU
politicians of his generation are also putting themselves forward as
modern conservatives. Julia Klöckner, a popular party
vice-chairperson, has criticized feminists for what she considers
misconstrued tolerance of misogyny among Muslims. Paul Ziemiak, head
of the CDU’s youth organization, is one of the loudest critics of
Merkel’s open-doors policy on refugees while emphasizing his own
immigrant background as the son of two Poles.
“Never
underestimate how conservative he is” — Daniel Bahr,
former health minister
“Twenty or 30
years ago, politicians like Jens Spahn or Julia Klöckner would have
been situated in the center of the CDU,” said Hendrik Träger, who
teaches politics at the universities of Leipzig and Magdeburg. Now
they are the conservative core of a party that has moved increasingly
to the left under Merkel’s leadership.
“Never
underestimate how conservative he is, including in ethical questions
and when it comes to societal issues,” said Daniel Bahr, a friend
and contemporary of Spahn and a former health minister from the Free
Democrats (FDP).
Spahn is still
something of a dark horse when it comes to talk about the CDU
succession, with more frequent mention of the 57-year-old Defense
Minister Ursula von der Leyen and 43-year-old Klöckner, though she
blotted her copybook by failing to win an election in her home state
in March. Previously, CDU contenders seen as direct threats to the
chancellor have tended to leave the field wounded. Spahn’s relative
youth means he’ll only be a contender once Merkel steps aside.
Spahn makes
conciliatory noises about the direction in which Merkel has taken the
CDU, saying that rather than “giving up some of our core
competences,” her reforms of military service and family policy
“fully comply with our conservative nucleus.”
But make no mistake:
He is quite capable of criticizing the chancellor directly, while not
wanting to fall out with her completely.
When Europe’s
refugee problem became an overwhelming crisis last fall, and hundreds
of thousands of refugees flocked to Germany alongside would-be
economic migrants, Spahn was one of the loudest advocates within the
CDU for taking a tougher stance than the chancellor.
He hosted the
presentation last November of a book of essays by 22 conservative
authors, which was followed by a panel discussion that produced a
torrent of criticism of Merkel’s refugee policy.
The headline in the
conservative daily Die Welt afterwards was: “Angela Merkel needs to
be afraid of this book.”
.webp)
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