Social Democrat Nancy Faeser hasn’t even been chosen as her party’s top candidate for the Hessian elections in around eight months, when the competing parties are already warning of the possible double burden. In a crisis like the current one, Faeser, as Federal Minister of the Interior, cannot also run an election campaign on the side, they say.
And anyway: If Nancy Faeser got into the ring in Hesse, she would have to immediately declare that she would stay there until the end of her political life – be it on the government bench or on the opposition bench.
In this context, many a reminder thinks of the fate of the once so vain and hapless Norbert Röttgen (CDU). As Environment Minister in the Merkel government, he accepted his party’s top candidate for North Rhine-Westphalia in 2012, but refused to commit himself to the state.
He remained in office, lost the election with a bang and was thrown out of the cabinet by Angela Merkel (CDU), who eliminated one competitor after the other. But: does it always have to be like this?
In the hardest months of the Berlin crisis around August 13, 1961, Willy Brandt (SPD), the then governing mayor of the divided city, challenged the aged Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU) in the election campaign. To this day, no historian has accused Brandt of abandoning the city because of this. After his defeat he remained in Berlin for five years, after which he became foreign minister and later chancellor.
In 1990 Norbert Blüm (CDU) tried his luck. In the hope that his reputation as long-serving Minister of Labor in the Helmut Kohl (CDU) cabinet could help him defeat the state father Johannes Rau (SPD) in North Rhine-Westphalia, Blüm threw himself into the election campaign without giving it a second thought. in the event of his defeat, to switch to the hard benches of the opposition in Düsseldorf. Blüm lost and happily remained in the Kohl cabinet.
Edmund Stoiber from the CSU did the same. After the Prime Minister jumped from the SPD as a Bavarian lion against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2002, he ended up as a bedside rug in Munich after the lost federal election.
Stoiber recovered quickly. A year later, with more than 60 percent of the votes in the Bavarian state elections, he not only won the absolute majority, but also, for the first and only time in the history of the Federal Republic, a two-thirds majority of the mandates.
Nancy Faeser will never make it that far – regardless of whether she remains Federal Minister of the Interior or not. Should she become her party’s top candidate, she will remain in the Ministry of the Interior for the time being. For a reason that has nothing to do with her: Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) will not find a suitable successor for her so quickly. But this is another story.
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