Foreign Policy Magazine
LUCIAN KIM
Until recently, Julia Kloeckner was a little-known provincial politician from Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Before she joined the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, in 2002, her main claim to fame was her one-year reign as the country’s 1995-1996 “Wine Queen.” As German viniculture’s promoter-in-chief, she once had the honor of presenting Pope John Paul II with a bottle of Riesling.This year, however, Kloeckner is back in the spotlight — not, this time, for her grape expertise, but for her stance on asylum-seekers, the issue currently roiling German politics. Kloeckner, who is running to become premier of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, first made national headlines in January, when she reportedly told dissenters within the CDU to “just shut up for once” in response to their grumbling over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy. At the time, she looked like a Merkel lieutenant helping to maintain discipline in the ranks.
A week later, however, Kloeckner made news again — only this time for siding with Merkel’s critics. Kloeckner released a paper that recommended deciding asylum claims directly at the border and regulating the flow of refugees through daily limits, determined on an ad hoc basis. All of a sudden, Kloeckner looked like a rebel, advocating for a plan much closer to the stop-gap, unilateral measures already taken by neighbors Austria and Denmark than Merkel’s cumbersome trans-European solution.
Kloeckner was careful to dub her proposal “Plan A2” — rather than a full-fledged Plan B — to gain some distance from Berlin during an election season. In the process, the whole country began to pay attention to Kloeckner: a bold, brash, and young Christian Democrat, who promised to restore the party to its conservative roots and walk back the open-door policy that her boss was defending so fervently. Even as Merkel’s popularity has taken a beating during the refugee crisis, the lack of a viable successor has left her firmly in charge. Yet Kloeckner’s debut on the national stage was a reminder that a new generation is on the rise.
Germany’s regional elections are scheduled to be held on March 13. The vote in Rhineland-Palatinate and two other states is being treated as a national referendum on Merkel’s refugee policies. Should Kloeckner win, her victory would put her in an excellent position in the race for who will lead post-Merkel Germany.
Kloeckner, 43, entered politics in 2002. Following her stint as Wine Queen, she worked as the editor of a wine journal before she was recruited to run on the CDU’s party list for the Bundestag as part of the party’s effort to fill one-third of their parliamentary seats with women. Thus began a meteoric rise that would take her to the top of the CDU in her home state of Rhineland-Palatinate in less than a decade and make her one of Merkel’s five deputies in the national party.In a collection of interviews published last year, Kloeckner, who grew up in a conservative Catholic family of vintners, described herself as a pragmatist. “Politically, my heart beats in the center,” she said. “I’m happy that I don’t have to drag a backpack through life filled with ideologies that only have a limited shelf life.” True to form, her campaign for premier is being guided by “common sense and pragmatism,” according to her website.
At the same time, Kloeckner has shown a sharp political instinct. Volker Resing, one of the journalists who co-edited the book of interviews, said Kloeckner has “embraced” the old guard of the CDU, visiting grandees such as Helmut Kohl, who launched his first bid for the chancellorship from Rhineland-Palatinate four decades ago. “She’s very power-oriented,” said Resing. “She’s not intellectual, but she’s interested in political analysis and political processes. Her big talent is that she can talk to everyone.” Up until this year, the secret to Merkel’s success was her predictability. Over the course of the 16 years she has led her party, she has calmly and unerringly moved the CDU to the center of the political spectrum, absorbing the positions of rival parties along the way — taking up the Greens’ long-standing demand for Germany to abandon nuclear power, for instance. When Merkel made the surprise decision to let in hundreds of thousands of refugees stranded in Eastern Europe last September, she was met with backlash from traditional CDU voters who didn’t recognize their party anymore. Kloeckner wants to win back the CDU’s traditional supporters. She campaigns not just against Merkel’s refugee policy, but also against assisted suicide, and for balanced budgets that include more funding for police. The fact she is unmarried and has no children could still prove a political liability, Resing said.
With the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) making inroads into the political establishment, the Christian Democrats are fighting for every vote in the upcoming state elections. The CDU is expected to remain the strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt, an eastern state with an unemployment rate of almost 11 percent, even as the AfD polls at 19 percent. But in the wealthy southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, the CDU has fallen behind the progressive Greens as the leading party. And in Rhineland-Palatinate, Kloeckner’s CDU is running neck and neck at 35 percent with incumbent Malu Dreyer’s Social Democrats. “If Merkel fails to win an additional state, anxiety will break out in the party,” said Gero Neugebauer, a political scientist in Berlin. “It will get hairy.” That is, it will show that the CDU is losing its appeal because of the government’s refugee policy.
Merkel is more isolated than ever. The center-left Social Democratic Party, her main coalition partner in the national government, is exploiting fears that low-income Germans will have to compete with refugees for social welfare benefits, while Horst Seehofer, head of the CDU’s arch-conservative Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, is demanding an annual cap on refugees and even threatening to take Merkel to Germany’s constitutional court. Local politicians from across the political spectrum are complaining that the federal authorities aren’t providing enough support to accommodate and integrate new arrivals. Other EU leaders have largely ignored Merkel’s calls for a Europe-wide solution to the influx. The chancellor is sticking to her guns: In an interview broadcast live on Feb. 28, she made an impassioned appeal for patience, arguing that by closing their national borders to refugees, EU countries were only creating the illusion of a solution by causing bottlenecks of human misery further down the line. “It’s my damned duty to do everything so that Europe finds a common path,” she said.
