Regular readers of Fran's Salon might be well familiar with the law-and-order-ist scarecrow and taboo-breaking exercises of Germany's federal interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble, of the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) party. But he is only an enterprising amateur relative to these two.

Roland Koch. Image credit: partykamera / flickr.com

Roland Koch is currently the PM of Hessen state from the CDU. He is a reckless post-yuppie, anything for power. He plays far-right tunes like no other on the center-right; he came to power in the first place thanks to starting a signature collection for a referendum against double citizenship. He survived several cases of being caught lying, be it knowledge of black accounts for his local party, or outrage at a government decision that turned out to have been staged.

Koch is a founding member of the Anden-Pakt, a power alliance within the CDU for mutual support and for the avoidance of mutual criticism in public, that was formed by (then) young CDU-ers on a plane to visit Pinochet's Chile. Many current members of the Anden-Pakt (see earlier mentions in this comment and 2005 nightmare scenario with Koch by DoDo) are PMs or faction heads in Germany's federal states. Angela Merkel could defeat them in her thrust for party leadership and chancellorship, but she is not powerful enough to publicly oppose them on policy.

Günther Beckstein. Image credit: gea.de

Günther Beckstein is currently the PM of Bavaria, from the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Socialist Union (CSU). Until a few months ago, he was Bavaria's long-time interior minister. He made a name as the most hard-core among his colleagues. He had a strong role in setting an important precedent, the case code-named "Mehmet": that concerned a 14-year repeated offender, who was the Munich-born but non-naturalised son of Turkish immigrant parents, who was deported to Turkey.

Bidding war between Koch and Beckstein

After a 20-year-old Turkish and a 17-year-old Greek(!) youth beat up a pensioner in the Munich subway (for asking them to stop smoking), Koch immediately jumped on the theme, to paint it as a problem with foreigners rather than youth. In an interview with mass daily Bild (the German equivalent of The Sun), he declared:

Now Koch is campaigning, he is facing elections later this month. So, being the deft provocateur, he added an attack on the (SPD) federal justice minister, and responded to initial outrage in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (main conservative broadsheet) with:

Nevermind that it was anything but taboo before for the Right, and that 'years of previous debate' curiously concentrated into election campaigns in previous years...

Riding the wave of his own scandal, Koch presented his proposals for stricter laws on 2 January: a 'warning shot arrest', preventive detention applied for adolescents, no transition time for 18-21 year olds, longer prison terms, driving ban, and easier deportation of foreign-citizen violent youth criminals. He said a week later that this should apply to EU citizens, too.

So what was happening in Bavaria in the meantime? First, in tow of a milder version of the usual list of right-wing get-tough demands, something surprisingly sensible came from Bavarian justice minister Beate Merk, according to magazine Focus:

Beckstein himself, however, switched to a tougher line: he has been none too happy about Roland Koch's public posturing with his issue, as Spiegel documents:

Not much impressed with Beckstein's charges, Koch has decided to press on and demand the application of criminal law for under-14 year-olds!

Koch, of course, was again talking about foreigners, though this time he shied away from explicitly stating so. Anyway, this was one wacky Koch proposal too far, and even Beckstein, in the course of formulating more repressive laws, could not follow:

Koch went too far, embarrassed even his fellow reactionary CDU Members, and had to backtrack.

The hits on Koch's credibility

Koch initially earned the usual outrage from all quarters on the left with general complaints. As an example, foreign minister and deputy chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) accused him of "brutalstmögliche Populismus" ('populism as brutal as it can be'), a reference to Koch's famous false promise to kick off an "investigation as brutal as it can be" in his party's corruption case. The Central Council of Jews in Germany, which is treated as moral institution in Germany, also attacked Koch for campaigning with bare differences to the semi-neo-Nazi party NPD.

The latter led to Koch receiving applause and protests of stealing arguments from another quarter... Udo Voigt, the leader of NPD, opined:

But Koch mouthed off without taking something into account: his own record. And especially his local SPD opposition was quick to point out two things: (1) during his PM-ship, he cut the Hessen police force by 1,000, (2) with on average almost four months from event to verdict for youth crime cases, Hessen lags far behind most other German states. This played big even in the implicitely pro-Right private television.

Koch was forced to admit these with bluster, and try some less effective excuses (like blaming it on the federal state -- but that would blame Merkel).

Now all this is happening as part of the campaign for the 27 January elections in Hessen. Recent polls (check Hessen state polls here) suggested major losses for Koch's Hessen CDU, and even though it was predicted to remain largest party, the Left Party's showing (whether it manages to pass 5%) is expected to decide whether he will have a majority even with his potential coalition partner (the [neo]liberal FDP; with the SPD, Greens and the Left Party being the impossible coalition partners).

Escalation

Now while Koch and Beckstein led the rhetorical campaign, the entire CDU lined up in support of more strict youth criminal laws at a meeting. The SPD kept against.

But the conflict really escalated further with the entry of a true heavyweight: ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder. At a local election event in Hamburg (which is also one of the federal states, and has elections on 24 February, with polls showing the CDU set to lose to SPD+Greens), he attacked Koch -- and Merkel. According to SPIEGEL:

Schöder obviously has not lost his political instincts, as he deftly moves the issue from the criminality of a few, partially foreign, youths, to Koch and Merkel's politics of fear and their apparent indifference towards right-wing violence. That charge is one that sticks, as Merkel's goverment is doing far too little about the rise of the German far-right, see this diary by nanne about that rise.

Schröder even upped the ante a day later, in an interview with Bild:

CDU spokesmen reacted with outrage and dismissal: they called Schröder one without style, suggested that he lost all contact with reality due to being surrounded with bodyguards and travelling in luxury cars. And anyway, he should just shut up.

After the attacks on Schröder, the attacks on Koch & co escalated from the SPD. Federal SPD faction leader (and former defense minister) Peter Struck had some quote edgy words to say in a radio interview with Deutschlandfunk:

The CDU worked itself up into a collective rage. They demanded an apology from Struck. But he responded with further escalation:

The insult at the end, citing Goethe, was:

What one should bear in mind: (1) this is about the worst insult without explicit words in German (the Hessen Left Party leader Willy van Ooyen could barely keep up by calling Koch a trigger-happy violent offender), (2) Struck is about the blandest leading politician in the SPD, so this coming from him almost suggests a provocation pre-planned by the entire SPD leadership.

In response, Struck's successor as defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung (CDU/Anden-Pakt, former Koch intimus) called Struck unfit for office. But the SPD leadership, including chairman Kurt Beck, firmly stood by Struck. Which finally forced chancellor Angela Merkel to weigh in:

Note Merkel's special situation: she may not have much time for Koch and his right-populism herself, but with her party firmly supporting that line, she can't appear to oppose it. What's more, one can safely assume that the Anden-Pakt consciously intends to push her over the brink on this issue (read 2005 analyis/prediction re Merkel vs Anden-Pakt by DoDo). In an earlier press conference, she was already forced to parrot Koch:

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What will all this lead to? We don't know yet. Polls show that a majority don't think current laws suffice, but would prefer prevention to stricter punishments, yet wide majorities are for the proposals on deportation of violent foreign youth and for 'warning arrests' (but not for boot camps).