Germany: The president’s ‘cowardly’ resignation

Germany’s president has proved to be a big baby, said Nils Minkmar in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. President Horst Köhler abruptly resigned this week in an apparent fit of pique after being widely criticized for a provocative comment. On an airplane on the way home from a trip to Afghanistan, Köhler mused that an export-dependent country like Germany might have to resort to military action to defend its economic interests. “For example,” he said, “to secure free trade routes, or for example to prevent regional instability that might impact our exports. These things should be discussed.” And discussed they were: Politicians and columnists across Germany immediately pounced on Köhler’s remarks, saying he had implied that the Afghan war was being waged for economic gain. The criticism was robust but not vicious or even personal—which makes his resignation all the more perplexing. Is he really so “thin-skinned” that he can’t bear “the debate that he himself called for”? His resignation is “cowardly.”

Köhler claimed his critics were showing a “lack of respect for the office of the presidency,” said Karsten Polke-Majewski in Hamburg’s Die Zeit. Those words are far better suited to describing his resignation. By abandoning his post, he has shown lack of respect “for the office, for the situation in the country, and for what citizens should expect from their head of state.” The presidency in Germany is not a partisan office. Instead, the president’s role is to transcend politics and “personify German unity,” to be a rock of stability. Yet now “in the middle of a severe economic crisis,” Köhler chose to “ignite a national crisis.” Chancellor Angela Merkel now has just a month to find a suitable candidate to replace Köhler and convene an assembly of federal and provincial lawmakers to vote him or her in—all while she’s busy trying to save the euro and make some of the deepest budget cuts in Germany’s history. It was not the time for the president to “flee his office.”

Obviously, the man had reached his breaking point, said Berthold Kohler in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Köhler was the first non-politician ever to hold the office of president—before that he had served as head of the International Monetary Fund—and he was evidently unprepared to weather political storms. As the fallout from his gaffe spread, he had no natural party allies to spring to his defense. “In the end, his political loneliness was so painful that he could only save his sanity with a desperate act.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Germans pillorying Köhler for resigning have only themselves to blame, said Denis MacShane in the London Guardian. Köhler’s fully defensible observation that German military power should reflect the country’s national interests was “grotesquely and cynically misinterpreted.” German politicians of all parties “beat their chests with fake indignation,” and newspapers piled on. After such a “hate-filled press campaign against him, fueled by headline-pandering German politicians,” it’s no wonder Köhler chose to exit public life. “The anti-politics and anti-politician mood now unleashed in Germany is ugly.”