Merkel Wins, Iran Loses

Angela Merkel’s decisive victory over Social Democratic rival Frank-Walter Steinmeier in last Sunday’s German elections is bad news for Tehran and the Mullah regime’s nuclear aspirations.

Consider, for instance, the controversy that erupted at the February 2006 edition of the annual Munich Security Conference. One of the featured speakers at the conference offered a particularly stern warning about the Iranian nuclear program and a particularly dire assessment of Iranian intentions. Insisting that Iran “must be prevented” from developing nuclear weapons, the speaker chastised the Iranian regime for “willfully stepping over all the red lines” that had been made known to it by the international community and excoriated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his “unacceptable provocations” in questioning Israel’s right to exist and denying the Holocaust. The remarks prompted an immediate and angry response from the deputy Foreign Minister of Iran, Abbas Araghchi, who was present among the public. But far from backing down, the speaker – now speaking without prepared text – went still further, reminding the audience that in the early 1930’s many observers had dismissed the threats of the National Socialists as mere rhetoric.

Despite his well-known and oft-criticized penchant for WWII comparisons, the speaker in question was not the then American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld also spoke at the conference. But as concerns the Iranian nuclear issue, he merely urged the NATO allies to continue “to work together to seek a diplomatic solution.” The speaker in question was German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (For the German audio and an English translation of Merkel’s speech, click here. Merkel’s testy exchange with Araghchi was reported in numerous both German and foreign media.)

The tone of Merkel’s pronouncements on the Iranian nuclear threat has not changed in the meanwhile. Thus, only last August, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Merkel again stated unequivocally that Iran “cannot be permitted to have an atomic bomb.” Suggesting a September deadline, Merkel insisted that if no progress is made in talks with Iran, “we must react with additional sanctions.”

Deeds, however, have not followed Merkel’s forceful words. This despite the fact that as a member of the so-called “P5+1” group, Germany has been promoted to the status of a sort of virtual permanent member of the UN Security Council as concerns the Iranian nuclear issue. In this capacity, however, Germany has, if anything, served as a brake on international efforts to achieve a more vigorous sanctions regime. Thus in September 2007, Germany reportedly deserted its western allies in the “P5+1” group and opposed a sanctions proposal aimed at forcing Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities. (See Matthias Küntzel’s “Berlin and Vienna Stand Against the West: European Divisions on the Iranian Bomb.”) Skeptical of the ability of the UN Security Council to take effective measures, at around the same time French President Nicolas Sarkozy began pitching a proposal to his European partners for the EU to adopt economic sanctions of its own. The EU countries would thus form a kind of “united front” or “coalition of the willing” with the US. Even if it was left to then Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik to break the bad news to Sarkozy publicly, this proposal too was, in effect, shot down by Germany. (For the details, see here.)

How is one to explain the disconnect between the Chancellor’s words and Germany’s actions? A matter of hypocrisy? A symptom of schizophrenia? Well, schizophrenia perhaps – though not the Chancellor’s schizophrenia, of course, but rather that of her “grand coalition” government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. For it should not be forgotten that following the Christian Democrats’ narrow electoral victory in 2005, Chancellor Merkel found herself saddled with a powerful Social Democratic foreign minister in the person of Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In the last four years, Steinmeier has often seemed to be pursuing a foreign policy entirely of his own devising. It was following consultations with Steinmeier in Berlin that Ursula Plassnik announced her opposition to Sarkozy’s proposed European Iran sanctions. According to diplomatic sources cited in the French press, Chancellor Merkel supported the plan (Le Monde, 14 September 2007).

If Chancellor Merkel has always had clear words for the Iranians, the same cannot be said for Foreign Minister Steinmeier. Thus, barely four months after Merkel’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, Steinmeier, in effect, shifted a large measure of the onus in the Iranian nuclear controversy from Iran to the United States and the other established nuclear powers. “We are for the effective application of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Steinmeier told the German news weekly Der Spiegel in a June 2006 interview:

The treaty contains a promise by the nuclear powers to disarm, and we should put pressure on them [sie drängen] to do so. Consequently, I am in fact of the opinion that beyond the current conflict with Iran, we need to review the worldwide situation of nuclear armament.

Since that time, the Foreign Minister has not ceased to beat the drum for nuclear disarmament, always being careful to suggest a link between the latter and nonproliferation efforts. Under Barack Obama, this has, of course, become the stance of the American administration as well.

In marked contrast to the chilly atmosphere of the Merkel-Araghchi exchange at the 2006 Munich Security Conference, at this year’s edition Foreign Minister Steinmeier could be seen greeting former chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani with a broad smile. (See photo here.) Larijani would go on to cause an uproar at the conference by defending Iranian Holocaust denial, noting that there are “different points of view” on the subject.

Now, however, following the Social Democrats’ disastrous showing in Sunday’s elections, Steinmeier is being shown the door. Confirming trends that were already discernable before the elections (see my FF report here), the Social Democrats (or “SPD”) took only 23% of the vote. This is by far the party’s worst result since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany after WWII and it represents a precipitous drop of nearly one-third of the party’s support as compared to 2005. The SPD’s decline and the strong showing of the – by German standards – economically-liberal “Free Democrats” (FDP) has paved the way to the formation of more programmatically-consistent “black-yellow” coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats. It is widely assumed that FDP-chief Guido Westerwelle will replace Steinmeier as foreign minister in Merkel’s new government.

Released from the ballast of Steinmeier and the SPD, will the new Merkel government adopt a more proactive role on the question of Iran sanctions? Perhaps. But, as chance would have it, Guido Westerwelle’s publicly-stated positions on nuclear proliferation and disarmament are not appreciably different from those of Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Thus, Westerwelle enthusiastically greeted the news of the Obama administration’s back-down from the eastern European “missile shield” by calling for a “decade of disarmament” (German link). He even suggested that American nuclear warheads should be withdrawn from Germany as “Germany’s” contribution to achieving this goal. In a June interview with the Rheinische Post, moreover, Westerwelle explicitly stated his opposition to new Iran sanctions, suggesting that sanctions would undermine the domestic opposition to Ahmadinejad.

On the other hand, these remarks – like other remarks by Westerwelle on foreign policy matters – have a certain inchoate, even improvised, feel to them. Moreover, as compared to the relations of force that obtained in the outgoing “grand coalition,” the Christian Democrats will be entering the new coalition in a greater position of strength vis-à-vis their new coalition partners. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister-party, the Christian Social Union, barely edged out the SPD by a score of 35.2% to 34.2% in 2005 and the “Union” parties controlled only a handful more seats than the SPD in the Bundestag. This time, however, the CDU/CSU will be entering a coalition with a party that it outpolled by a better than 2-to-1 margin (33.8% to 14.6%). Chancellor Merkel has not hesitated to point to this electoral math, noting that as a consequence we can expect to see “more Christian Democrat politics” in the new coalition. If this prognosis holds true for the Iranian nuclear issue, Tehran should have reason to be worried.