Controversial Campaign
January 21, 2008
Wolfgang Clement, German economy and labor minister under former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, has kicked up a storm after he said voting for the SPD in Hesse on Sunday, Jan, 27 would mean supporting energy policies that damaged not just the western state but the whole economy.
In a column for the conservative paper, Welt am Sonntag, Clement said voters in Hesse needed to consider SPD candidate Andrea Ypsilanti's opposition to nuclear power and coal-fired plants.
"Whoever wants it the way she does must know: this can only be achieved to the detriment of Hesse's industrial substance… and that of Germany," Clement wrote. Voters should "therefore choose and consider carefully," who they wanted to run Hesse, according to the former minister.
Clement slammed as energy lobbyist
Clement's criticism of Ypsilanti has angered the SPD, further stoking a heated controversy surrounding the Hesse election after the incumbent Christian Democrat (CDU) premier Roland Koch latched on to crimes committed by foreigners in his election campaign.
Many SPD members say Clement's comments are linked to his current job with a major energy company. In 2006, shortly after leaving the federal government, Clement joined the supervisory board of RWE Power AG, a unit of one Germany's biggest utilities, the Essen-based RWE.
"Clement has unmasked himself as a lobbyist for industry," Ypsilanti's spokesman Frank Steibli said. Clement is a former SPD deputy leader and ex-premier of Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Peter Struck, leader of the SPD in the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, called for Clement to be thrown out of the party.
"Whoever urges people not to vote SPD should face exclusion from the party," Struck said at an election rally in Bad Homburg.
He reiterated his criticism on Monday, Jan 21.
"Everyone has the right to an opinion. He (Clement) has to think about whether he's in the right party," Struck told public broadcaster ARD.
But SPD leader Kurt Beck urged his party members to remain calm though he said he understood their outrage.
"We won't take him (Clement) too seriously because he's speaking here as a lobbyist for a big energy company," Beck told public broadcaster NDR. "I have other things to deal with and not Clement's escapades."
Clement has defended his criticism of the SPD's energy policies, rejecting accusations that he was speaking as a lobbyist for RWE. In an interview with daily Kölner StadtAnzeiger, he said he was expressing a position he had fought for all his life and that he was sticking to his guns.
CDU losing ground in Hesse
The election in Hesse, a politically and economically important state in Germany that has been ruled by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) for nearly a decade, has stirred German public opinion after an openly xenophobic campaign by Premier Roland Koch.
Koch, who is seeking a third consecutive term as leader of Hesse, has riled immigrant groups, the Jewish community and Germany's left-wing voters and politicians with calls for deportation of "criminal foreigners" and an end to "multicultural" coddling of immigrants. A brutal pre-Christmas attack on a German pensioner by two young immigrants on a Munich subway train prompted Koch to seize on juvenile crime as the mainstay of his re-election campaign.
However, Koch's campaign seems to have backfired. Just a few months ago, Koch was expected to secure re-election with ease. But latest opinion polls show he and SPD candidate, Andrea Ypsilanti, who is campaigning with calls for a national minimum wage, running neck-and-neck.
A recent Infratest poll of 1,000 people for ARD showed that no more than 38 percent of respondents would elect Koch if they were able to vote for candidates directly compared with 48 percent for SPD challenger Ypsilanti.
The loss of Hesse would be a huge embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been criticized for failing to rein in Koch for his anti-foreigner comments. Merkel's CDU rules together with the SPD in a "grand coalition" at the federal level.
Kohl, Fischer wade in controversy
In an indication of the importance of the Hesse election for German national politics and the passions it has generated, two former political heavyweights have weighed in the controversy.
Former chancellor and CDU member Helmut Kohl threw his weight behind Koch on Monday, Jan 21. In an interview with mass-selling paper Bild, Koch said he supported Koch's position on juvenile crime.
"Increasing crime committed by immigrants wouldn't be stemmed by making it a taboo," Kohl said.
After an absence from active politics for two years, Former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer meanwhile campaigned his Green party in Hesse on Monday. Polls show that the Greens may lose ground in the state.
"A premier like this needs to be voted out of office," Fischer said about Koch.