The emirate's investments in Germany
have won it friends in the highest corridors of
power.
Matthew
Karnitschnig
and Gabriel
Rinaldi
Illustration
by Justin Metz for POLITICO
JANUARY 13,
2023 4:01 AM CET
Last
summer, as European media became increasingly critical of Qatar’s hosting of
the World Cup, Doha decided to go on the offensive and dispatched Hassan Al
Thawadi, the event’s chief organizer, to Germany.
The emirate
had spent much of the past decade cultivating Germany as a strategic partner,
investing some €25 billion in the country, one of the Gulf state’s biggest bets
anywhere in the world. But with concerns rising about human rights abuses in
the country, in particular its treatment of migrant workers as well as gays and
lesbians, the goodwill Qatar had built up was at risk of slipping away.
Al
Thawadi’s visit was an opportunity to try to disarm the critics and to deploy
some of the country’s most prominent German boosters. Sitting in a box
overlooking the home field of perennial German champion Bayern Munich (Qatar
Airways happens to sponsor the team), Al Thawadi spoke to the club’s members —
many of whom had reservations about their team’s affiliation with the emirate —
about the “power of football” to effect positive change.
Alongside
him were Sigmar Gabriel, the former German vice chancellor and foreign
minister, and Christoph Heusgen, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s longtime
national security adviser and, for four years until he retired in 2021,
Germany’s ambassador to the United Nations.
The
meeting, which also included an assortment of labor experts and human rights
campaigners, was advertised as a “roundtable” discussion about the criticism of
human rights in Qatar. With the help of Gabriel and Heusgen, however, it
quickly morphed into a lengthy infomercial for the Gulf upstart — replete with
slick charts on the supposedly astounding progress the country had made in
recent years in human rights, and the essential role it plays in world affairs.
“Qatar is
one of the few stable places in the extremely fragile world we live in where
negotiations can still take place,” Gabriel declared at one point, calling the
emirate, which covers a peninsula in the Persian Gulf between Saudi Arabia and
Iran, “an amazingly stable country in an unstable region.”
Heusgen,
who served as the moderator of the discussion, echoed the former minister,
calling Qatar “a model” for other countries. (Heusgen — probably best known for
laughing at Donald Trump at the U.N. as the U.S. president warned Germany about
its overreliance on Russia for energy — agreed to moderate because he is a
Bayern Munich fan, his spokesperson said, adding that he wasn’t paid.)
“Although I
know a thing or two about the world, I really learned something about Qatar at
this table today,” he said with a grin at the conclusion, stressing how
football had been a “catalyst” for change in the emirate.
Network of
allies
In
Brussels, Qatar has come under intense scrutiny amid allegations that it sought
to buy political favor in Brussels with suitcases full of cash (something the
Qatari government strenuously denies). In Germany, its preferred avenue of
influence has been more transparent, if no less effective: the stock market.
Over the
past decade, the emirate’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment
Authority, along with members of the country’s ruling family have built major
positions in some of Germany’s most recognizable corporate names, including an
11 percent stake in VW, the country’s largest carmaker, and 6 percent in
Deutsche Bank, its largest bank. Last fall, the Qataris picked up a 5 percent
stake in Porsche, making the emirate one of the largest shareholders in the
storied luxury sports carmaker.
For years,
Qatar could also be counted among the biggest customers for Germany’s defense
industry. What’s more, with the war in Ukraine forcing Germany to shift away
from Russian petroleum, the emirate — the world’s largest exporter of liquid
natural gas— has become a key provider of energy. Indeed, a photograph of
Germany’s Green Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck making a deep bow to the Qatari
trade minister during a visit last spring while casting for new gas supplies
could be seen as a defining image of Germany’s current government.
Though
Qatar has invested on a similar scale in both the United Kingdom and France,
the emphasis of its German engagement has been less on eye-catching trophy
purchases than nuts-and-bolts infrastructure investments.
In the U.K.
Qatar has bought up luxury hotspots like the Ritz hotel and the world-famous
Harrods departments store and erected the Shard, the country’s tallest
building. In France, it acquired the Paris Saint-Germain football club. But in
Germany, the Gulf state’s flagship purchases include stakes in the shipping
giant Hapag-Lloyd and energy utility RWE.
Even if the
investments have left something to be desired in terms of financial returns,
Qatar’s participation in the German economy has helped it make friends in the
highest corridors of power. While there’s been no suggestion of the type of
corruption that Belgian prosecutors allege took place in the European
Parliament, Qatar’s corporate moves have gained it a formidable network of
influential allies, including former ministers and other senior government
officials, helping to make its voice heard in Berlin.
The most
prominent of those allies in Germany is Gabriel, the former leader of the
country’s ruling Social Democrats. As economy minister from 2013 until 2017, he
cultivated ties to Qatar, taking a plane full of business executives there in
2015. In 2020, two years after he left public office, Gabriel joined Deutsche
Bank’s supervisory board at Qatar’s behest.
“German
arrogance about Qatar makes me sick,” he tweeted in October amid a drumbeat of
negative comments by public officials about the emirate’s treatment of gays and
lesbians, noting that “homosexuality was illegal in Germany until 1994.”
Gabriel’s
intervention triggered no small degree of consternation given that Germany
began to gradually amend a 19th century law targeting homosexuals in the late
1960s. (By the time it was abolished in 1994, the law to which he referred
applied to sexual relations with teenage males under 18 years of age and was
rarely enforced.) In contrast, same-sex relations are a serious crime in Qatar
and, under the country’s Sharia law, could be punished by stoning — though
there’s no evidence of that happening in recent years.
Gabriel
wasn’t the only prominent German to voice his displeasure with how Qatar was
being treated. A few days after his tweet, Joschka Fischer, one of Gabriel’s
predecessors as both vice chancellor and foreign minister, chimed in.
“I think he
has a point when he criticizes a certain holier-than-thou attitude,” Fischer
said in an interview with the weekly Stern.
Neither
Gabriel nor Fischer are quite as vocal when it comes to describing what
contractual relationships, if any, they have with Qatar.
Gabriel,
who is chairman of Atlantik-Brücke, an influential German lobbying network,
responded to a POLITICO query by noting that as a “private citizen,” he didn’t
feel obliged to answer any questions about his dealings. He added that he had
observed all relevant German disclosure rules governing the activities of
former officials.
Neither
Fischer nor his consulting firm responded to a request for comment as to
whether he had ties to Qatar.
One of the
main vehicles of Qatar’s German influence operation has been the
state-sponsored Munich Security Conference (MSC), the annual guns-and-diplomacy
confab in the Bavarian capital run by Heusgen and German
diplomat-turned-consultant Wolfgang Ischinger.
The emirate
has hosted, and helped fund and organize, two MSC meetings in Doha in recent
years. In 2018, Ischinger afforded Qatar Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani the rare
privilege of addressing the MSC’s opening session as the heads of the United
Nations and NATO looked on.
A former
Qatari prime minister and foreign minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani,
also sits on the MSC’s board of trustees — its most exclusive body, reserved
for the conference’s biggest donors. (A spokesperson for the MSC declined to
say how much he had donated.)
Qatar has
also been a client of Ischinger’s consultancy, Agora Strategy Group, which the
emirate hired in 2017 to train its then-ambassador to Germany, a member of the
ruling family, on the finer points of diplomacy. The engagement was a wise
strategic move: The then-ambassador, Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, is
now the emir’s chief of staff.
A spokesman
for Agora said Qatar is not currently a client. Qatar declined to comment for
this story.
Bad blood
Despite the
best efforts of Qatar’s German influence network, shifting public opinion in
the emirate’s favor in Germany has proved challenging.
In addition
to human rights abuses and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, Qatar’s
defenders have had to cope with reports that the country spied on Theo
Zwanziger, the former head of Germany’s football association and a vocal critic
of staging the World Cup in Qatar.
Zwanziger
was a member of FIFA’s executive committee and had called the decision to give
Qatar the tournament “one of the biggest mistakes ever made in sport.” He also
referred to the country as “a cancer on world football,” triggering a lawsuit
by the Qatar Football Association, which Zwanziger won.
The
emirate, concerned that Zwanziger’s effort to strip the tournament from Qatar
could succeed, paid more than $10 million to a company run by former CIA
operatives to spy on Zwanziger, according to documents uncovered by the
Associated Press last year. The goal of the three-year effort was to infiltrate
Zwanziger’s inner circle and manipulate him, according to the documents.
Unsurprisingly,
the German media’s coverage of the World Cup was less than flattering. German
politicians, who would normally grab the chance to bask in the limelight of a
World Cup, avoided Doha like the plague amid the tsunami of bad press the
country was receiving.
The only
senior German official to attend a game was Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, whose
portfolio also includes sports. She created a stir by wearing a rainbow armband
promoting LGBTQ rights, a gesture her Qatari counterparts considered an
affront.
The bad
blood between the two countries deepened after German team members cupped their
hands over their mouths during a team photo — an apparent protest against
controls on freedom of expression during the tournament. Following Germany’s
early exit, many Qataris mocked the team by covering their own mouths for the
television cameras.
The discord
set Qatar’s German defenders into motion. Heusgen, who happened to be in Qatar
on a “private” trip to attend a World Cup match in late November, met with
Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, an MSC regular, while he
was there.
“The government
in Qatar is disappointed with us,” Heusgen confided to Germany’s Der Spiegel
afterward. The magazine described how Al
Thani had complained to Heusgen about Germany’s “self-righteousness,”
“hypocrisy” and “unwillingness to accept a different culture.”
Qatar also
got a hand from Germany’s deep state.
In a
lengthy cable to Berlin in early December, Germany’s ambassador to Qatar,
Claudius Fischbach, lambasted his country’s treatment of the emirate,
concluding it had “squandered the trust” previously enjoyed there. He
complained about what he considered a lack of balance in what he called “an
unprecedented media campaign.”
The cable
drew notice, not only for its fiery contents but because it had been
distributed so widely within the foreign office as if to ensure that it would
be leaked.
Fischbach’s
main argument was that his compatriots seemed not to realize what was at stake
in the small emirate.
“There’s no
need to debate that we neither can nor want to give up on Qatar as a
pro-Western ally,” he wrote. “Energy supply, a proven track record as a
mediator in a difficult region and reliable investment in Germany are the most
important points.”
Those
realities aren’t lost on everyone in Berlin. Even as criticism of Qatar was at
a fever pitch in late November, German energy firms quietly signed a 15-year
agreement to buy up to 2 million tons of Qatari LNG. While that’s only a drop
in the bucket in terms of Germany’s gas needs, it’s likely just a first step
toward further deals.
Qatar, it
would appear, has Germany right where it wants it.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário