Frankie’s 11
I was eight years old – Mozart was writing his Concert in G-Dur at the same age – when I first joined a gang. Not a gang like you get in the Bronx or the badlands of Neuköln, no knives or tattoos, just a group of friends who had their own secret code, who hung out together, pulling girl’s pigtails and copying each others homework.
There is no greater honour for a little a boy than to be accepted by other little boys. The binding stays with you for life, the sense of solidarity: no wonder bad films like Oceans 11 are popular. They touch something primal.
Well, now Steinmeier has his gang, Frankie’s 11. Or 19 minus Ulla. OK, most of them are girls but they wear trouser suits. And it’s still (dennoch) a good idea. Because leadership is measured according to your ability to judge people. If you have attractive, interesting people in your gang then you too look pretty good. And if you can persuade someone young and talented like Manuela Schwesig to join your “Kompetenzteam” then all cannot be lost for the SPD. She has a future ahead of her. Ergo, the party has a future. That is what the election managers must have told Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The truth, as we all know, is that Ms Schwesig has been signed up to be a stewardess on the Titanic. Frankie’s 11 is not going to last beyond the summer. It cannot ever form the germ of a future government because the Social Democrats have, for the moment, run their course as a party of power. And no amount of trouser suits and young faces can disguise the fact that Frank-Walter Steinmeier is clinically boring. Nice, I suppose in an ostwestfälische way, but boring.
So the Kompetenzteam is programmed to self-destruct. But that doesn’t mean it is a bad concept. Imagine if all political decision-making could be run this way, as a collection of brilliant people who ride everywhere together like the family in Bonanza, or Robin Hood and his outlaws, or King Arthur and his Knights. In Europe you could pluck the most versatile and interesting politicians – the Swede Carl Bildt, say, or the extremely bright Danish environment minister Connie Hedegaard. It is a pleasure to hear these two politicians speak – in complete sentences, always with content, sharply formulated. Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, could be part of the gang – if only because he is the only politician I know who has ridden a horse through the mountains of Afghanistan – and I would like to see his fast-talking British colleague David Miliband as a kind of Zukunftsminister. The French have got international calibre ministers too: the intriguing Bernard Kouchner (who else in Europe has such passion?) and Patrick Devedjian, the Wiederaufbauminister who clearly understands the subtle connection between finances and psychology.
You will notice that there is no German in this Dream Team. The reason: the Social Democrats, in power since 1998, are exhausted. They are suffering burn-out. And their deep fatigue is dragging down the CDU even though they have been in government only four years. Globalisation speeds up the clock and leaves the slow-moving German political system overwhelmed and stunned. Red-Green entered with elan but soon found itself bogged down by wars abroad, by Kosovo, 9/11, by the emotional effort of staying out of Iraq , and by the crushing detail of a reform that nobody wanted. Under Merkel there was some elan, too, until just after the Weltmeisterschaft 2006. Then came the banking crisis, the global meltdown. Long hours; bags under their eyes; the loss of purpose in a world where events have been moving too fast. There is a sense of helplessness about the German political class. Rightly or wrongly, the electorate now judges the Grand coalition to be a coalition of mediocrity. The emergence of a new face, Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg – why does he always look as if he has just come out of a shower? – is important to the Chancellor because together they can pretend that the burn-out is specific to the SPD. Merkel, because she has stamina, zu Guttenberg because he is still fresh. But the truth is that both Volksparteien have reached their limits. They have nothing left to say to us (or to each other) and know that Germany , with its vertiginous new debts, its accelerating underemployment and ever deeper involvement in a shooting war, has become almost ungovernable. No wonder that gifted young people no longer want to enter politics. And that Kompetenzteams do not entirely convince the voters; the bigger they become, the more their thinness is exposed. Who would want to join a gang like that?
