Wowereit goes into hiding
For a terrible moment I was worried that Klaus Wowereit would be stranded in Moscow by the ash cloud. Alone, without journalists, in the strategically critical month before the start of the summer election campaign. A cruel interruption in his dialogue with the electorate.And then I realised: there is no campaign. The Regierende Buergermeister seems to believe Berliners will automatically vote for him in September, hypnotised by his charm and because(there really are some people in his circle who talk like this) he is truly loved by the people. Well, the last person(last German, I’m not counting Kim Il Sung or Muammar Gaddafi) who felt the same kind of vibrant love from his citizens was Erich Mielke. Surely, surely, evil old Mielke couldn’t be a model for a lupenreine democrat like Klaus al-Wowereit? Of course not. But you have to wonder why the Ordnungspolizei have become so active and who has authorised their chic new VW patrol cars. And why Aral petrol stations have been advertising a so-called Volksfruehstueck.
It was a strange trip to Moscow. Almost a pilgrimage. Berlin, Wowereit told the Russians , does not maintain such an intensive relationship with any other of its Partner cities. Can that really be true? Is that the depressing foreign policy result of the Red-Red-Simply Red years of Senat mismanagement ? No surprise then that Barack Obama has by-passed Berlin on his tour of Europe. All that we seem to have got out of the Wowi trip to Russia is the promise of Sichuan-Takin goat from Moscow zoo. I suppose if things get really bad we can always eat it.
Perhaps the true purpose of the mayor’s eastern safari– which seems to have been organised with exceptional haste– was to keep him out of Berlin when bad news was about to be announced. This is one of Wowereit’s great talents. Remember the 2003 sombrero trip? Those daily missives via Bild zeitung in praise of Corona beer and Mexican flair while we were watching the city, from rather closer range, sinking into the financial morass? As I recall, he telephoned the Rathaus once during the entire trip.
The bad news this time was of course that Berlin faces a Haushaltsnotlage and is likely to be put under Finanzaufsicht. As I understand it, this is a bit like the electronic foot-tag that has been attached to Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The threat of Finanzaussicht means that there has been a collapse of trust in Berlin’s ability to solve its debt problems. Like DSK, it will be under constant supervision. The parallels with Greece, whose budget is now patrolled by the IMF( minus Strauss-Kahn, much to the relief of Grecian womanhood) and the European Union, are obvious. Both micro-states have Socialist leaders, both have bureaucrats who take siestas, both have pensioners who are young enough to be my children, both have unruly anarchist demonstrators who cause chaos to the railway system. OK, Berlin, still has no sea. And no Acropolis. But as a very instructive Page Two comparison in the Tagesspiegel made clear last week both places are not only crippled by debt, and weighed down by heavy subsidies, they are both utterly without ideas as how to proceed. Wieviel Griechenland zeigt sich in Berlin, asked the Tagesspiegel headline. Usually, you can answer these Seite Zwei questions with a crisp “Ja” or “Nein”, skip the text and move on swiftly to the sudoku. This time, the answer to wieviel was more complex: ziemlich viel. Thus raising the unasked question of why Wowereit wasn’t doing something about it.
Was he perhaps going to unveil new ways of raising revenue, of attracting investment? Was he going to sell assets, privatise? Was he going to negotiate again with the Bund ? Was he going to cut back the vast army of Beamten and Angestellten– 189,000, more than the entire population of Charlottenburg ? Obviously not. There is an election approaching. If Wowereit had his way the entire finances of berlin would be run by someone else. The IMF, a man from Mars, the French Foreign Legion, Thilo Sarrazin, what does it matter as long as he can keep his hands free and his mind creatively blank. Action, any action that brushes against Berlin’s swollen subsidy culture is a potential vote-loser.
So whenever a tricky problem arises, Wowereit goes into hiding. There were whole weeks during the winter S-Bahn crisis when you would have had to use tracker dogs to find the mayor. That is how Klaus Wowereit has stayed in power: he disappears when difficult decisions have to be taken.
And who can blame him? Nobody likes to be unpopular. It is just sometimes worth remembering that he gets paid 183,000 euros netto for running this city. You can buy an awful lot of goats for that.
