He wants to be alone for a while. Frank-Walter Steinmeier walks into an empty room at the Boston Hotel Intercontinental, looks for a long time through the imposing glass facade at Massachusetts Bay, at the wooden ships and at the Tea Party Museum. This is reminiscent of the uprising against British colonial policy. Today, US hardliners use the term tea party to fuel the right-wing revolution against the democratic establishment in the USA. Steinmeier looks at the water, raindrops roll off the windows.
In Boston, the Federal President sometimes looks as if he is wallowing in the good old days. During his two-day trip to the United States, there is also a meeting with an old companion who, in his view, comes from sensible America: the former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, with whom he negotiated the Iran nuclear deal for years. It was smashed by US President Donald Trump.
A lot is in ruins for the Federal President too. The western model of liberal democracy is under heavy pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. Steinmeier is often not perceived correctly, but he does not want to broadcast at the same volume as the populists of the world. Does he resign?
Steinmeier must fear that he will only have a term of office because the weakness of the SPD makes it unlikely that he will be re-elected in 2022. Just as he tries to defy the dangers in Germany by talking, listening and building bridges, he is here to strengthen transatlantic friendship, to understand what can be learned from the United States in the fight against the erosion of democracy. Or is this argument already lost?
“This America wanted real friendship”
Steinmeier speaks a lot in the past tense in Boston: “United States has always been a matter of concern for America,” he says. Or “this America wanted real friendship”.
As President of the United States, he’s in the United States for the second time, for the second time avoiding the White House. As Foreign Minister, he called Trump a “hate preacher” at a question time in Rostock in August 2016. Steinmeier said he was very concerned about the “monster of nationalism” that is spreading worldwide. Back then, those were clear words for someone like him, whose pauses in thinking sometimes seem to take so long that Trump sends two tweets into the world at the same time. In Boston, the Federal President prefers not to use the name Trump at all.
The White House? What should that do?
The monster of nationalism has not shrunk since 2016, as this trip shows. And meanwhile the developments have spilled over to Germany. Steinmeier knows that even if he had asked to visit Trump, he would hardly have been able to make a difference. The trade conflict, impending US sanctions for the German-Russian gas pipeline project Nordstream and the conflict over what Trump believes are insufficient German defense expenditures for NATO – these are matters for the Chancellor.
Working with Barack Obama was not without controversy either, but there were never serious doubts, for example, about the United States’ commitment to NATO. Sure: an argument with Trump on the open stage, a question about the hate preacher quote, that would outshine what is more important to him: the other America, strengthening friendship, the forces that want to defend the free order.
The Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut spent around 20 million euros on the “Wunderbar together” program this year. The money flowed from 2,000 events across the United States, reaching around 1.3 million people. The Goethe-Institut in Boston has been extensively modernized so that something from “Wunderbar together” remains permanent. Steinmeier says about the reopening: “As Federal President I am here to raise my eyes, out of the daily focus on tweets and tirades, but also beyond the often expected and fruitless outrage. “
He shuns contact with Donald Trump’s America
He wanted to widen his view, “back to our shared history and what we hope will continue to connect us in the future”. And he emphasizes: “There can be no democracy without America.” He appeals to the youth: “Exchange the classrooms, exchange the lecture halls or the training companies – regardless of who resides in the White House or which coalition in Berlin.”
But he shies away from contact with the other America. For example, he could have traveled to the Rustbelt to learn about Trump voters. Or he could have demonstratively backed up the workers at the world’s largest BMW plant in Spartanburg, underlining Germany’s commitment to jobs in the United States. With this visit, Steinmeier and his wife Elke Büdenbender primarily want to strengthen the cultural bridges.
A highlight is the joint concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in the Boston Symphony Hall. Music as a universal bridge, no matter how bad the political relationships are. Steinmeier keeps saying “thank you”, also for the support after the fall of the wall 30 years ago, it is almost celebrated here, a very German-friendly atmosphere.
The actual heading of the trip is “Populism and Polarization – Challenges on Both Sides of the Atlantic”. At a working breakfast on the eleventh floor of the Interconti hotel, Steinmeier asks: “Do we have enough Democrats who are fighting for democracy?” In the United States, he has little hope that a Trump vote will change everything again. Anti-liberal populism, prejudice instead of facts: “It won’t go away after the next election either.”
It doesn’t help outrage
Just as Trump campaigned against Washington, many citizens in Germany feel that federal politics lives in the Berlin bubble. And here, too, the attacks on dissenters, violations of rules, agitation on the Internet and insufficient protection by the police and the judiciary are having an effect. Tenor of the group: It does not help counter-outrage, only the sober argumentation with the facts.
Steinmeier sits diagonally across from the large table in the conference room, Daniel Ziblatt, director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University – he wrote the bestseller “How Democracies Die” with Steven Levitsky. One thesis: Those who form alliances with democratic enemies believe that they can contain coalitions, which contributes to creeping death. The authors cite the Weimar Republic, Mussolini and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela as examples. In the United States, the Republicans once thought they could contain Trump.
The alienation of the SPD from the workers
Zieblatt flew to Boston in Steinmeier’s government aircraft, and is researching the rise of the AfD at the Science Center for Social Research in Berlin until 2020. He sees an alliance with the AfD at the municipal level as a dam break. But if you block a Bundestag Vice President of the AfD, you break the rules in the same way that you accuse your opponents – because the position is also due to the AfD. That is water on the party’s mills.
The discussion also refers to the role of the media – whoever wants to abolish fee-financed television in Germany is preparing the ground for an ideologically colored broadcaster like Fox News. Steinmeier looks really stunned when Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, takes the floor.
Mounk speaks of the estrangement of the SPD from the workers who began to choose AfD today. Steinmeier has to take a sip of his juice first, he was Chancellor and Agenda 2010 architect during Gerhard Schröder’s term in office.
Steinmeier tries a lot in the here and now. His “coffee table” meetings bring citizens across Germany together for civilized arguments with each other. When Steinmeier invites threatened and assaulted mayors to Bellevue Palace – as in July in response to the murder of Kassel government president Walter Lübcke – the guests are grateful for this back strengthening. The president himself now has “a thread that has not been broken since then,” says the Mayor of the Saxon city of Pulsnitz, Barbara Lüke. Others seem indifferent to the outstretched hand. The AfD parliamentary group leaders Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland, it is said, had shown no “need for discussion” when they were invited to visit him.
He says that “democracy must set limits”
But where he sets limits, the concept of conversation also has its limits. It could be that Steinmeier is the first Federal President to lose the power of the word. Not because he lacks the right words. But because black and white dominates.
“Franz would like the typewriter”
A few weeks ago in Leipzig, at the ceremony to mark the 30th anniversary of the major, decisive Monday demonstration, Steinmeier called for new round tables all over the country to fight against “constant outrage and hatred”. Almost at the same time on October 9, just 30 kilometers away, the fatal shots of the far-right perpetrator who had tried to enter the synagogue were fired in Halle. Steinmeier’s words were therefore lost.
On the trip, it is Thursday, the Federal President is particularly impressed by the visit to Walter Gropius’ house, which the Bauhaus founder moved to in Lincoln near Boston in 1938 after being driven out by the National Socialists. Today it is a museum, everything is still true to the original, minimalist, clear forms. “Franz would like the typewriter,” says Steinmeier. And laughs his loud laugh towards the wife of ex-SPD leader Franz Müntefering, Minister of State Michelle Müntefering.
Erika Pfammatter, Gropius’ granddaughter, explains to guests how things used to go here in the house, that Gropius even arranged the cinnamon stars symmetrically on the plate in the Bauhaus lines for Christmas. And she quotes a sentence from her grandfather that Steinmeier would sign immediately: “The spirit is like a parachute. It can only work if the mind is open. ”
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