Merkel and the Deep State - Part 2
Merkel and the Deep State - Part 2
Rudolf Novotny
The speed with which Angela Merkel rose from a political unknown to Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany is one of the great riddles of the 21st century. Merkel never formally took out a membership in the CDU; she is on record as saying in 1989 that she wanted nothing to do with it and only became a member when the small, liberal party she joined in the last days of the GDR was merged into the Union. She possessed no vision of the good, true, and beautiful, being content merely to keep the ship of state floating at dock — to give an illustration, one of her close advisors (who these days earns his keep in Zeitenwende grifting), whom I met once at a function, challenged me to name a single major Merkel policy, and, when I hesitated, looked back at me with an impossibly smug grin: „You see?“ Nor, for all the swooning over the „iron chancellor“ by the Rachmans and Barbers of this world, did her reserves of willpower reach particularly deep. This is a woman who, during the 2011 G20 summit in Cannes, burst into tears and told Obama „this is not fair“ when he suggested allocating new special drawing rights at the IMF to a proposed Eurozone bailout fund. Who was Angela Merkel?
The Christian Democratic Union is an organisation greased by rounds of beer and hearty slaps on the back at the village Volksfest. It is no place for a dour pastor’s daughter from Brandenburg. Its politicians enter the party at a young age, usually but not exclusively through its high school or university organisation. It has its own, peculiar form of meritocracy: at the bottom rungs, ascent is regulated by one’s performance in low stakes elections for local, inner-party positions, and losing even the most inconsequential electoral contest is a black mark in anyone’s book. The degree of centralisation in the party is closer to that of US Republicans than to the Tories, and it is customary for CDU politicians to climb the ranks through their local organisations before ascending to national office. As a result, by the time they arrive in Berlin (or previously Bonn), they already have vast personal networks within local civil society and their state-level party, while those who came up through the youth organisations can call upon a national network of ambitious, like-minded young men whose intensity of conviction is matched only by their willingness to throw all principles overboard for personal advancement.
During Merkel’s rise, there were three major networks operating within the CDU. The most powerful was Kohl’s old network, which held sway in the 1990s through incumbency advantage. But this group fell to earth when its major players was rattled by an expenses scandal at the turn of the millennium, which forced Kohl’s designated successor, former Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, to relinquish his position as the party’s chairman and parliamentary leader (the former office falling to Merkel, the latter to Friedrich Merz, the party’s current leader). Kohl’s youthful challengers, Merz among them, banded together in the so-called Andean Pact, a tight-knit Rhenish Catholic Männerbund (there were no female members, nor were any welcome) with a self-assured, straight talking style closer to that of the Anglo-American centre-right than the dull cadence of the Federal Republic.
In terms of substance, there was little difference between Andeans and Kohlians. What ultimately separated them was not ideology, but generational identity. Whereas the polemic against ’68 and its consequences defined the former (Merz once described the young Merkel’s penchant for bombastic invective against the ’68-ers as „acquired knowledge“ — as opposed to the blood and soul conviction of West German conservatives), the Kohlians belonged to an older, more conciliatory generation with an organic connection to the pre-democratic Germany. Perhaps this mix of temporal dimorphism and readiness to compromise explains why Schäuble sought to extend the hand of friendship to the generation of CDU politicians below the Andeans, who had not come of age in the crucible of anti-maoist student activism, to whom many of the maxims of the 1960s counted among the simple facts of life, and which would later occupy key positions in Merkel’s ministries.
Schäuble, tasked by Kohl with the management of the security services, had a working relationship with the third network, the Dark Rechtsstaat. Like Kohl, his relationship to them appears to have been ambiguous. Their electoral base of power was concentrated in the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), with which the former shares a parliamentary group in the Bundestag. Their man was Edmund Stoiber, Minister-President of Bavaria. Stoiber had an excellent working relationship with Wolfgang Schüssel, a man well-known to J’accuse readers, and attended the meeting in Munich where Schüssel, Erich Vad, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jan Marsalek discussed the creation of a militia in Libya to dam the Mediterranean migrant smuggling route. It is very likely that, as Minister-President, he had a hand in the deal that brought Bank Austria under Bavarian control and neutralised it as a factor in socialist agitation. Here is what EIR has to say about him:
„Stoiber has disagreements with key aspects of British-American-Commonwealth (BAC) geopolitical policies, documented by his spectacular trip to Moscow in early May at the peak of the NATO air war against Serbia, and by his outspoken opposition to ground war options in the Balkans. Such disagreements certainly are not forgotten among the BAC cabal. Stoiber is a leading representative of a section of the German elite that is as much pro-American, as it is open for cooperation with Russia and China, and is also in favor of developing the high-technology sectors of industry, including nuclear power (which is exactly what the red-green coalition wants to abolish).“
As Minister-President and a power broker within the CDU, Stoiber personally played an important role in Helmut Kohl’s outreach to China:
„Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who will receive Chinese leader Li Peng in Bonn in mid-July, and plans to visit Beijing in October, had his spokesman declare diplomatic contacts with China „a project on the level of the chief.“ This made clear that Kohl considers this field important enough not to leave it exclusively in the hands of his Foreign Ministry, which is known for its Anglophile views.
Reflecting Kohl’s views, a mid-May report by the Economics Ministry identified the transport infrastructure and energy sectors of China as the most crucial fields for investments, because that is where the Chinese economy has some of its worst bottlenecks, and where German industry has specialized know-how.“
Already in mid-April, Bavarian State Gov. Edmund Stoiber returned from a tour of the Chinese province of Chandong, with which the Bavarians have a sister-state partnership, with the message that the Chinese have a deep interest in cooperating with the Germans, with whom they have had positive experiences (unlike their experience with the British, for example). Stoiber portrayed a prominent role for German industry in China’s national infrastructure development program, which over the next 10 years envisions the construction of 100,000 kilometers of roads and highways, 20,000 km of new railway tracks, and 10 new nuclear power plants.“
Stoiber held a vision of Germany’s humanistic mission as a leading international development player; of a „Eurasian land bridge“ linking supply chains from Wuppertal to Wuhan. He had a particular — and much-mocked — affinity for maglevs. He was also the most conspicuous defender of the CDU/CSU’s „social responsibility“. The consonance of his thought with the EIR’s policy programme is, in my opinion, too exact to be wholly a coincidence — this is not to say that Stoiber actually read any of the LaRouche publications, in which he later came under fire for compromises with his inner-party opponents; rather, it is more likely that both received ideas from the same source.
It was „geopolitics“ that ultimately brought Stoiber down. Only with the backing of the firmly transatlanticist Andeans could Stoiber muster the numbers to thwart Merkel’s candidacy and lead the CDU/CSU into the 2002 election. But to win the Andeans’ support, Stoiber — against his better instincts and under pressure from Schäuble and the party chairman Merkel, who recognised this as a wedge issue — had to recant his opposition to German participation in the American-led coalition agains Iraq. This was, by all accounts, a highly unpopular position with the electorate, and sealed his defeat that autumn to Gerhard Schröder’s SPD. In the ensuing contest of power, the Andeans were outmanoeuvred by Merkel, who ousted Merz as CDU/CSU parliamentary leader with Bavarian „logistical support“. A secret bargain was struck between Merkel and Stoiber — this much has been confirmed by the latter’s comms advisor Michael Spreng — under which the CSU received personnel concessions in the next government in exchange for assistance in the coup against Merz. Its scope and contents can only be left to speculation, but it seems significant that this crucial milestone on Merkel’s road to power was paved not with a confrontation, but a deal with the man of the Dark Rechtsstaat against a stridently pro-American faction at the Berlin court.