German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is on the campaign trail. He is running as the left-wing SPD party’s candidate to replace incumbent center-right CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Bundestag elections set for September 27, 2009. For Steinmeier–a rather dull 53-year-old technocrat-turned-politician who had previously served as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s chief of staff–this marks the first time ever that he is competing for elected office. To avoid any risk that this political novice stumble in his first campaign, the SPD party gave him a safe district in the former East German state of Brandenburg.
Back in 2002, Steinmeier’s boss ran on a populist, anti-Bush platform and made a successful, last-ditch effort to save his faltering re-election campaign by confronting Washington head-on over the Iraq war along with French president Jacques Chirac. Seven years later, Schroeder’s disciple Steinmeier is pursuing a very different political strategy vis-à-vis the United States: Given President Obama’s phenomenal popularity ratings in Germany (remember that speech in front of 200,000 fans in Berlin last July?), Steinmeier is now over-eager to appear as someone who is held in high esteem by the new president and his administration–especially with regard to the issue of granting select Guantanamo inmates political asylum in Germany. In fact, Steinmeier has been one of the EU’s earliest and most outspoken proponents of the notion that Europe should help the Obama administration close down Gitmo by accepting those allegedly “innocent” and “harmless” inmates who cannot be returned to their countries of origin for fear of being persecuted and tortured there. In the case of Germany, Steinmeier is specifically pushing for the admission of nine Uighurs, Muslim-Chinese men who were arrested by U.S. forces during anti-terrorist operations in Afghanistan back in 2002-2003.
