Germany's Bundestag president has warned that national concerns in looming EU-Brexit negotiations must be compatible with the wider European project.
On a two-day visit to Ireland beginning on Wednesday, Norbert Lammert, one rung above chancellor Angela Merkel on Germany’s constitutional ladder, will visit the Dáil, meet Taoiseach Enda Kenny and travel with President Michael D Higgins to the Border.
For the Government the visit is a timely opportunity to explain Irish concerns on the peace process, bilateral trade and travel arrangements with Britain that predate the EU. Merkel and her officials have remained studiously equivocal on Irish concerns to date, meaning Lammert’s remarks will be scrutinised closely for clues.
Do the Germans accept Ireland's Brexit concerns as legitimate and doable, or just another member state's special pleading for what Germans call an extrawurst – an extra sausage?
"There is only a chance for an extra sausage as long as everyone understand they are all being served from the same butcher," Mr Lammert told The Irish Times. It would be an "anachronism" if Brexit caused remaining EU members to strengthen national competencies, he said. The big questions – from global security to the refugee crisis – can still be tackled only with a common European voice.
“Everyone has their own interests that are particularly important to them,” he added, “but if there is no butcher any more, there are no more sausages, let alone extra sausages.”
Political pilgrimage
Lammert conceded that on his watch as Bundestag president since 2005, Berlin has become “one of the most visited places of political pilgrimage in the world” – for Irish officials particularly since the euro crisis. But, with a nod to history, he acknowledged how Germany has drifted into a kind of leadership role in Europe that no one planned, or wants.
“We have a double problem: a significant increase in expectations from our neighbours and partners combined with a notable reticence of our own population to accept – let alone actively fill – such a role,” said Lammert, who was first elected an MP for the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1980. “But the fact that we’d prefer things quieter and cosier is no excuse not to tackle the challenges we face in Europe.”
Born in Bochum in 1948 and married with four children, Lammert studied history and political science and has been a member of the CDU for 51 years. In his time as Bundestag president, which ends with this parliament, he has been a continual voice of intellectual reason in turbulent political times.
From his Bundestag podium and in regular public appearances, one of Lammert’s specialities has been to question political cliches, most recently the Trump era trope that the western world is spinning off its axis: “We know of no world that wasn’t off its axis.”
For the first time, however, Europe faces these challenges united in a community of democratically elected governments and parliaments. “If we don’t solve these problems,” he said, “it’s not that we can’t solve them, but because we don’t want to solve them.”
But how does such a reasoned politician go about tackling problems, given the polarised battle for minds – and votes – and newer arrivals like Donald Trump? “There’s a lot to be said for the prognosis that this firework and colourful illusion will soon burn out
Old Reichstag
These are weighty words as we sat in the Bundestag, which, since 1999, has been housed in the Reichstag building that went up in flames in 1933.
Historians still argue over who set the Reichstag on fire, but most agree on the disastrous political consequences. Instead of burning himself out as his contemporary critics predicted, Adolf Hitler – then in power just a month – exploited the fire to secure his grip on power.
Promising “no mercy for whoever stands in our way”, the Nazi leader forced through a so-called “enabling act” that ended parliamentary oversight and began Germany’s slide into dictatorship, state-sponsored terror and war.
While their history has made Germans particularly wary of inappropriate Hitler comparisons, that same history has left people here hypersensitive to Trump-style authoritarianism, with its attacks on the media and judiciary.
Given those Reichstag ghosts around us as we talk, how concerned is Lammert of the Trump administration exploiting – or even causing – an “enabling moment” to secure its grip on power?
After seven seconds, he said: “I have no doubt about the US constitutional system’s ability to act or to resist challenges, something I feel has been confirmed by the results of the first tests of strength between the executive and judiciary.”
Far-reaching powers
In recent speeches, Lammert has warned that US protectionism and unilateralism “create as many new problems as this approach allegedly solves”. At present, he said he is less concerned about Washington than Ankara, where MPs’ backing of constitutional reforms to hand president Recep Tayyip Erdogan far-reaching powers can now only be stopped by a referendum.
“And given our recent experience with important referendums for important questions,” he said, referring to the Brexit vote, “I find it particularly difficult to be hopeful.”
Ahead of Germany’s own federal elections in September, how does Lammert view the next Bundestag’s most likely new addition, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland? Is it an unwelcome impediment for a fourth Merkel term, or an enrichment of German democracy?
“The parties in the Bundestag are not the ones the establishment views as an enrichment,” he said, “but those the voters want to see there.”
