German floods test chancellor candidate Laschet

BERLIN — Germany’s flooding disaster poses a double challenge for Armin Laschet, the frontrunner in the race to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor.

As leader of one of the regional states hardest hit by the flooding, Laschet is being tested as a crisis manager and facing scrutiny over his stance on climate change.

His position as premier of North Rhine-Westphalia put him front and center of the response to the disaster, particularly as Merkel was out of the country on a visit to the United States when the floods hit.

Laschet, the candidate of the governing Christian Democrats to replace Merkel after a general election in September, canceled a trip to Bavaria and headed for the provincial city of Hagen, where the flooding caused significant damage.

“A crisis is always a moment for the executive,” said Julius van de Laar, a political campaign strategist. “Thus, the way Laschet acted on Thursday, canceling his trip to Bavaria and positioning himself as crisis manager and part of the executive, was the only right thing to do.”

But Laschet’s prominent role in the disaster response also meant he faced questions about his climate record.

While acknowledging that man-made climate change increases the frequency of severe weather events, Laschet — who has been criticized by political opponents for half-hearted climate policies — said Thursday the catastrophe was no reason in itself to bring forward Germany’s coal phaseout date.

“You don’t change policy just because now we have a day like this,” he told a journalist in a TV interview.

While Laschet’s party has pushed ahead with measures to mitigate climate change and invest in clean energy technologies, he himself has warned that green measures must not harm Germany’s major industries.

That’s important in the context of the package of measures proposed by the European Commission this week that include a looming de facto ban on the internal combustion engine, a measure that a large part of Germany’s auto industry opposes.

And Laschet is well aware that a chancellor candidate’s response to such a disaster can be decisive for their fortunes.

In the run-up to the 2002 election, the Social Democrat incumbent Gerhard Schröder waded through mud in the town of Grimma following severe flooding in eastern Saxony. The images are now considered a critical factor in his eventual win against Bavarian conservative Edmund Stoiber in that year’s ballot.

More recently, then-Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer regained an absolute majority for his conservative party in the 2013 regional election, four months after he showed up in the city of Passau, which had then experienced its most devastating flood in five centuries.

On Friday, Seehofer, now federal interior minister, told Der Spiegel that “nobody can seriously doubt that this catastrophe is related to climate change,” and called for measures to combat climate change both in Germany and across Europe to be sped up.

Green dilemma

Meanwhile, the Greens, who are second in the opinion polls behind the Christian Democrats, have faced a challenge of their own in responding to the disaster. Climate change is the party’s core issue but getting political in the middle of a national tragedy carries risks.

The party’s candidate for chancellor, Annalena Baerbock — hit by allegations of plagiarism and résumé inflation in recent weeks — initially limited her interventions to social media, rather than racing to the scene of the floods on Thursday. She eventually traveled to the region on Friday.

Her party co-leader, Robert Habeck, also addressed the disaster but chose to stay away. Amid a weeklong campaign swing through his home state of Schleswig-Holstein when the news broke, Habeck said Thursday that he felt he should leave visits to the scene to those with a direct role to play.

“I would just be a politician who stands in the way and somehow wants to be in the picture,” he told supporters at a campaign event in the northern city of Kiel late Thursday. 

He cautioned against knee-jerk political reactions to the crisis, saying it’s too simplistic and too soon to speak about the flooding as a direct consequence of climate change: “This catastrophe — that is for many people an environmental catastrophe — is already being interpreted politically,” he said.

But putting the situation in context is important, Habeck added: Extreme weather events like these are happening more often and becoming more severe, while time is running out to tackle the issue.

“A singular occurrence is a singular occurrence, and certainly has many causes and reasons,” he said. But “the complexity and frequency of singular occurrences is a strong indication that something is changing … the number of natural catastrophes is growing, and we’re going to have to reckon with even more of them.”

Other Greens have already come under fire for making it political too soon.

Late Thursday, the Greens’ parliamentary deputy leader Konstantin von Notz had to apologize for using the crisis to highlight his rivals’ transport policies on social media.

“Such a situation is not at all suitable for polemical tweets,” von Notz tweeted in an apology.

According to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls election tracker, the gap between the Christian Democrats and the Greens is widening. The latest aggregate figures put the conservatives at 29 percent, the Greens at 18 percent and the Social Democrats at 16 percent.

But the situation in the west of Germany should divert attention back to the Greens’ core messages.

“After weeks of scandals … this could be an opportunity to paint a new picture,” van de Laar said of Baerbock’s position. “At the same time, however, the Greens need to be extra careful not to look like they are exploiting people’s misery.”

Meanwhile, Alice Weidel, co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, warned against any attempted push for new environmental policies.

“Demanding higher ‘speed in climate protection’ on victims’ backs is disrespectful,” she tweeted.

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