In Germany, it is rare that a defense minister enjoys great popularity. The matter is complex, good news is rare, and the state of the Bundeswehr is worrying. In any case, the chances of embarrassing yourself in office are much greater than the chance of probation and recognition.
Nevertheless, the Social Democrat Boris Pistorius managed to place himself at the top of all surveys. Since the beginning of his one-year term in office, the man from Lower Saxony has received the highest praise. It was his friendly, open manner that was the reason for his success, the unaffected language of a man who admitted that he was “really keen” to take on his new position. There are also huge differences among politicians.
Some can be recognized by looking at random pictures of a queue for an Easy Jet flight in Madeira. There, at the end of a short winter vacation, the holder of command and control over the armed forces, the minister of an entire fleet of state aircraft, stood in the middle of the low-cost airline crowd with a small backpack and endured the slow processing and then the cancellation of the flight due to bad weather the other passengers. Zero privilege for the minister and his partner. A fellow passenger had taken one or two photos of the scene and sent them to the tabloid press. For Pistorius, it is a priceless gift on the one hand, but also the result of remaining normal, which brings him high recognition among the troops and the public.
His ratings have even risen, while his party and his leader Olaf Scholz have fallen deeper and deeper. The defense minister is now more popular than anyone before him, while Scholz and the SPD are doing worse than any chancellor or his party before. Particularly worrying for Scholz: According to a recent survey, two thirds of those surveyed want Pistorius to replace him as chancellor. In politics, however, this also means: With growing popularity and emerging competition from the “maker” (Der Spiegel) and “reserve chancellor” (Süddeutsche Zeitung), Scholz's interest in enabling his minister and any competitors to achieve success must decrease.
Flaming rhetoric and too little money
Pistorius already got a taste of this when Scholz recently cut hundreds of millions of euros from his budget in order to close budget gaps in the traffic light. Scholz can hardly have missed the fact that this does not fit well with the fiery rhetoric of his minister, who speaks of an army “fit for war” in the face of Russian imperialism and is examining the reintroduction of compulsory military service. He accepted it, Pistorius was warned. His relationship with Scholz was already characterized by competition once, namely when they competed against each other in the tough competition for the SPD chairmanship four and a half years ago – and both lost.
If necessary, the Ministry of Defense is also a suitable place to destroy any competition. Angela Merkel recently demonstrated this when she politically starved CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer in the Bendler Block. For a decade and a half of Union-led federal governments, the conservative parties have paid little attention to the armed forces and their pitiful condition. The Social Democrat and new Chancellor Scholz initially thought of continuing this tradition. He entrusted Christine Lambrecht, who actually wanted to say goodbye to politics, with the run-down ministry. Lambrecht would, Scholz explained to the astonished audience at the end of 2021, “become a very, very important defense minister”.