The Prime Minister whom nobody saw coming

Political late bloomer, sixfold father and boss of a hairdressing chain: Up until this Wednesday, hardly anyone in Germany knew the FDP politician Thomas Kemmerich. Now the 54-year-old has shaken the Republic. A portrait.

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Thomas Kemmerich sits in the passenger seat of an old Volvo and fingers around in a bag of wine gums. He asks the reporter whether he can choose the color. Sure, she says. The 54-year-old reaches for a red and yellow candy. “There is no yellow-blue,” he says with a grin. That was three and a half months ago. The program was called “test drive” and should introduce the top candidates of the Thuringian FDP a few days before the state election in an unusual atmosphere. This Wednesday, Kemmerich, who hardly anyone outside of the Free State knew, shook the political landscape of the Federal Republic. He was elected Prime Minister – with the votes of the AfD. More precisely: with the votes of Björn Höcke’s group, who himself is too radical for many members of his own party.

Are the political colors yellow (FDP) and blue (AfD) a combination, after all, with the help of which a government can be built in spite of all demarcation arguments?

Lord of over 20 hair salons

Thomas Kemmerich, father of six and born in Aachen in the Rhineland in 1965, is a German politician who is unusual in several ways. He is not one who dreams of living as a representative of the people even in his youth. He only joined the FDP in 2006. Before that, he was an entrepreneur, one of those West Germans who went to the East after reunification to find their happiness there. Some fall on the nose. Kemmerich gains a foothold. The law graduate initially worked as a management consultant and then converted several East German hairdressing companies into a company under his leadership. Today Masson hairdressers operates 20 branches in eight cities,

Kemmerich’s second political life runs in waves. After joining the party, the tall bald man is the first to become involved in the FDP-affiliated liberal middle class. After a short time, their members elect him to the state and later to the federal chair. In 2009, he took on the first mandates as parliamentary group leader in the city council of Erfurt and as economic policy spokesman for his party in the state parliament.

In 2012 Kemmerich experienced the first political defeat. In the mayor election in Erfurt, he is wiped out with 2.6 percent of the vote. The second failure follows two years later. The FDP, already weak in the east, fails in the election because of the five percent hurdle. Kemmerich is now only a city councilor. His candidacy for the party’s national presidency the following year shows that he does not want to be satisfied with this. He competes and wins.

Cowboy boots with a suit

Kemmerich reminds a little of Wolfgang Kubicki, with whom he gets on well. The 13-year-old FDP vice is more elegant and gives more entertaining speeches than the sixfold father from Erfurt, who wears cowboy boots with dark suits. But both have a nose for moods. Both avoid the jargon of the Berlin political bubble and are seen as independent minds, which probably has something to do with financial independence. Those who, like the entrepreneur Kemmerich and the lawyer Kubicki, do not need to be reelected to pay their bills, can speak and act more freely than others.

After Kemmerich took over the national presidency of his party, his political career started again. In 2017 he secured his association’s first place in the list in the federal election. And when the FDP succeeded in re-entering the national parliament, Kemmerich followed. As a member of the Economic Committee, he is primarily committed to reducing red tape for medium-sized businesses. As an illustration, he tells of his own painful experiences. It once took him nine months to get a tax number after he founded his company. During this time, he had already had six lawsuits because he had not submitted a tax return.

The trip to Berlin is already over two years after the Bundestag election. Kemmerich is the top candidate of the FDP for the state election in Thuringia. Again, the party is about everything. The re-entry is barely successful. The Liberals stumble back into the state parliament with only 73 votes above the five percent hurdle, and Kemmerich resigns from the Bundestag.

Thuringia, land without a middle class?

And now, three and a half months later, that: The Rhinelander, who emigrated to the east, becomes head of government in Erfurt, as the second FDP prime minister in German history. And the first to come into office with the votes of the AfD.

In the Phoenix film that ran before the state election, the reporter von Kemmerich wants to know why the FDP is actually so weak in eastern Germany. The party is really struggling, he admits. Especially the members of the middle class moved away after reunification. With the others, who relied more on the state, there were fewer «exchange opportunities».

Can a liberal entrepreneur lead a stable government in a state in which the political margins in the form of the Left Party and the AfD come together to 54 percent of the vote? Can he appeal to a middle class that is barely there? And will the middle class in the rest of the country accept the way he got into office? The political life of Thomas Kemmerich remains exciting.